Some Fairlight CMI IIX Sounds
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- Опубліковано 10 лют 2025
- This video shows some sounds from the Fairliht CMI IIX sampler from 1983 which used 8 inch floppy disks to store 8 bit samples. This particular machine has gone on world tours with Michael Jackson and other groups.
This thing must have felt like a space ship from the future for musicians in the early 80's!
It feels like a space ship from the future *now*!
do you believe that it is released in 1979? ;)
@@AbbyChau The model IIX in this video was released in 1983. But yes, the original Fairlight (series I) was released in 1979.
Yes I agree - but in some ways it was merely a Mellotron with more fidelity.
The price tag to 😁
THIS is the sounds I'm after, those digital artifacts and harmonics in the low register add so much character and crunch, throw some light reverb on and OOMF it sounds lovely
you are full of shit mate........your rumbled........wishful thinking was it
@@ianhuntington9056lol what
you can get high quality digital version of the CMI that has all these sounds
@@williamtopping i dont particularly like this line of thinking, because it's basically saying you can't appreciate or utilize sounds unless they come from the original instrument. Well, the original instrument is obsolete, insanely expensive and rare. Yet, thanks to the incredible work of sound designers, they are able to reproduce those sounds thanks to modern processing power, allowing many more people to enjoy and experiment with these legendary synths.
@@esp-music Yes but they don't sound exactly the same.
The 'rolled-off' and graininess nature of the Fairlight is one of the things that gives it so much character and makes it
sit behind vocals without it being overbearing.
For anyone curious, SonicBloom has a ton of free CMI samples available, a lot of the ones featured on here are in there as well!
It's really amazing how far and fast synth tech moved in the 80's - 90's era. Not even a decade after the first release of the CMI there were far more affordable samplers, which were just as capable, on the market... What a time to be alive and collecting gear.
Boofsquad Behringer makes samplers???
Boofsquad Every synth they have made has been both good & affordable.
That's what ultimately killed Fairlight.
By the mid 90s you could do it all on a Soundblaster card in your PC. They were indeed amazing times. For me the most exciting computing era was the 90s, the rate of improvement was phenomenal.
@@ian_b sound blaster 🤨
That Michael Jackson disk was kind of interesting. The original sound on the record was not done with a Fairlight, but instead with it's rival at the time, the Synclavier. :)
And it was also sampled from the Synclavier preview vinyl, not played in studio.
It's funny, I own the Arturia "virtual" CMI Fairlight, and after watching this video I opened my Arturia CMI Fairlight to discover that this Michael Jackson disk was an included sample.
Rory Kaplan was the one who played the Fairlight CMI on both the Jackson's Victory Tour and Michael's Bad Tour so this might be his disk he had made up I guess.
I have that vinyl disc, never knew the sound was lifted from it.
@@lan5053 The MJ Bad Tour disk isn't included.
A generation later the Fairlight CMI is still one of the most awesome musical instruments ever conceived. Your demonstration brings out the best in it.
The mellotron of the 80s
A mellotron capable of Musique Concréte, even.
Perfect way to describe it!
Genius description
A melotron that cost about the same as a house. And these things where cheap compared to the synclavier. Seriously, in the early 80s a Fairlight would cost you about 50K pounds. You could buy a small house for cheaper. The Synclavier cost 10 times that for a maxed out rig. These keyboards where pretty much for the filthy rich. Now, you can get a VST plugin that'd blow them out of the water ten times over for a few hundred dollars.
The price of using hardware 20 years ahead of the game, I guess.
@@shayneoneill1506 they where more for sound studios and universities. They where not really intended to be bought by individuals. It was completely out of this world when it was released but like you said not all that interesting for making music these days.
ARR1 will forever be THE quintessential and defining sound of the Fairlight CMI to me.
OMG I wish I can relive the moment of inserting a floppy disk in these old computers.. I was born in 1989 and I was fortunate to hear them in the early 90's... so nostalgic
I was born in 1971 and can remember using 5 and a quarter inch disks (on a BBC Micro), but I've never had the pleasure of using the comically large eight-inch discs of the Fairlight. He storage capacity must have been about 256kb or something ridiculous.
360KB
imitated but never duplicated. even now after all these decades it still has the most original and unique library of sounds.
To demonstrate the capability of this thing, Def Leppard’s albums pyromania and hysteria (which set the standard for 1980s rock music) used the Fairlight heavily. Beautiful
This sounds like an Amiga on steroids. I love it.
You probably know this but that's because Amiga also used sound samples for its music and the composers probably would have got hold of whatever short length instrument samples they could get their hands on and I bet a lot of them were ripped from the CMI. That guitar at 3:18 in particular ;)
In 1997 Fairlight becomes self aware. It plays Peter Gabriel albums to the Soviets, thus forcing them to launch missiles
This is a video I love coming back to. This thing was ahead of it's time!
Sampled guitar noise at 3:11
You’ll find that kind of sound all over Nine Inch Nails early albums.
Witness 4 The Prosecution Version 2🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻
I used to have Alan Parson's old Series IIx, then in 1988 bought the Series III (at horribly great expense!). Page R was so ahead of it's time in terms of composition speed. I loved that you could say Copy Patterns 1,3,5,7,9 Bars A,C,D,F, instantly mapping out bars and bar segments, then group-combine them and repeat. It was so simple, you could more clearly think your way through the structure of the song, without a GUI of interminable clutter.
In brussels a studio used to have porcaro's black fairlight , there is a run of approx 50 black fairlight IIx s
I have no idea how I got here or what is going on but that analong synth sound was so good
it's digital to the bones
Magnificent machine. I'd love to have a go on one. Even tho its digital, it has a ton of character compared to today's squeaky clean VST samplers.
If you want character, an Emulator 2 or emax will give it to you.
Every sampler is digital
Fallout musicians be like
Holy Crap!! It's ART OF NOISE!!!
Yep
@@SPAZZOID100 Ya gotta love that green screen.
"Yes and the AON pushed this thing so far it left the industry scratching their heads on how they produced their records like that 👍"
1:15 hey!
Plucked Strings / harpupgd @5:19 sounds like the sample “the art of noise” used for the harp interlude in “moments in love”.
"it is 👍"
Lovely to see this instrument still working and being played technology moved very fast I purchased a Korg prophecy 5 not half the size of the fair light cmi yet produced some wonderful sounds I bought in the mid 80 s and it is still working
Had one as well. Prophecy came out in 1995.
What the hell! I’m 56 years old and have been involved with music all my life. And because I just watch a video of the breakdown of the song - OWNER OF A LONELY HEART by YES. It is mentioned a lot of being used in the song. And I have never heard of this instrument. So here I am going down this rabbit hole learning about this instrument. Lots of fun and thanks for sharing. PS. The 70’s and 80’s was the best music ever made!!! Lol - but true!!!
What?!! How can you not have heard of this, it was every musicians dream to have one, everyone had heard of them just like everyone knew the Linndrum, DX7, TR808, D-50, Korg M1
All the huge artists used them
There’s also the emulator and synclavier that did the same as this
I love the Fairlight qwerty keyboard, that thing is bulletproof
What makes it legendary is the fact that you can get the technology and sound architecture in maybe $400 worth of software, but if I could I would STILL get the real thing.
This thing sounds absolute beast!
Ahhhh.... this takes me back :) Orch5 is a sound that takes me right back to the 80s as if it was yesterday.
Recognising sounds from music of my childhood. Freaky and oh so awesome!
1:52 - sound of my life :)
The Rhodes 1 sound was also used by Roland in the S-50/S-550 as well as
many other Roland keyboards and modules right up to the early 90s, I
believe some of the Emulator samples possibly also came from Fairlight.
But seriously imagine back in the early 80s saying "Mommy, Daddy I want
a Fairlight for my birthday". I think the answer would have been "NO!!!!!!"
Even many studios couldn't afford a Fairlight.
I seem to remember Rhodes 1 used on the TV show Arthur
At one point, the official UK retailer of the Fairlight CMI was Peter Gabriel and there were only half a dozen of the machines in this country. They were all owned by famous musicians/studios backed by record labels. No children got one for Christmas.
God what a beautiful sound
Great video quality, arrangement of the background and composition
Kate Bush said she loved her Fairlight. The sounds at about 2:40 remind me of a song by Dead Can Dance. Interesting.
Are you thinking of the song "How fortunate the man with none" ?
@@MonsieurSlick It does remind me of "How Fortunate the Man with None". I think the synth sound they used in that song was a roland Juno synth brass and also used a lot of Korg M1 for percussion on the album.
Incredible machine, and they were hand made from scratch, even the computer keyboard!
That Michael Jackson sample sounds sexy on this machine! I could think of a new song, using that sample.
Beautifull piece of tech! I always enjoy songs from the 80's were this sampler is used in!
0:52 was used in the Score for The Terminator (1984).
How can 8-bit samples sound so good?
Sample rate and converters. It’s not the same 8bit that was in video games of the 80’s.
a decent DAC
Because it isn't
2:38 that patch sounds absolutely beautiful!
I like this “clean guitar” samples. Very nostalgic and sad. “Brass” is also very interesting
The “how you like me now?” part at the end sounds like a herd of cats.
What hell sounds like
Shhhh, that's what they actually say all the time.
This thing looks and sounds so amazing
Old tech is sometimes the best. Amazing sounds. I would have loved this back in the day.
Your 1st sentence--- yes, sometimes old tech IS the best. But not this one Kort. 2nd sentence--- Are you fkng kidding me? These sounds are far from awesome. 3rd sentence is your only win-- Everyone loved this back in the day. Those days were the birth time of synthesizers and samplers, there was nothing else like this then, and so we all thought WOW! That lasted about 2 years. Kort, methinks you need to spend some quality time tuning up your ears.
@@lesizmor9079 - I guess we're all entitled to our opinions. Perhaps my nostalgia is getting the better of me, but I think this sounds pretty cool. Maybe not modern and top quality, but cool. ;')
The Beat It intro sound was immediately recognisable!
Same for the 'deliverance' banjo theme.
HAHA! My band buddies and I would have loved to own a Fairlight back in '87. It was our dream. How far we've come in tech. These sounds are hilarious!
I can’t imagine how cool this must have sounded when it first came out
it sounds the same now as it did then
@@jessihawkins9116 they mean how cool it must have been to hear stuff like this back then. You need to remember. Before the CMI the idea of sampling a sound didn’t really exist
@@gamingwithcallum6087 yes it did. there was the mellotron
@@jessihawkins9116 🥱
Also, you have to remember that many of the synthesizers out there when this guy came out couldn’t manage much more then bloops and bleeps.
Love the sound of this thing. So cheesy but gritty at the same time.
ahead of its time.. beautiful masterpiece
Visually, the monitor, the keyboard, and those old diskettes (which I can't believe are able to function many, many years after they were rendered obsolete) make 1983 look so OLD. But I have to say I am impressed with some of the sounds, if, mixed into the rest of the production, probably passed for pop music pretty well in the '80s.
With the disks, it’s probable the files were saved and then copied onto floppies that weren’t 30 years old
@@creeptones no they are original
Oh man those short loops
Reminds me of the old 8 bit Akai sampler I once borrowed from school. Super short samples. You could play the looping artifact as its own thing. :)
The most beautiful sounds.
Fantastic machine...
This feeling when 80’s sample machine sounds better than all you have now in 2020
Yup 😥
No
I believe it's because of a few things that work together. One was the limited resources back then that a musician had to write music and to record it. It was easy to just observe the dozen or so tools to your availability and use the sounds they provided to make your songs. Now, we have thousands, and thousands of instruments, plugins, presets, etc.... and that creates what is called "choice paralysis" for the user. They are simply overwhelmed with all the tools at their disposal to where they see less value in their tools, they don't know where to start, and they just bounce from tool-to-tool, when they don't like the first preset they choose instead of actually experimenting and modifying and making a sound.
this made me immensely happy
Jan hammer used it all over the MIAMI VICE T.V. Series soundtrack back in the 80s. That unmistakable 8 bit quality with lots of reverb and chorus is omnipresent on the backing score. He used page R in the software , which allowed you to use it to sequence both internal and (via an upgrade board), external gear.
It was quite big with all the added bits (drives, keyboard, monitor etc) , and sounded like nothing else. The synclavier cost even more and was much higher resolution with fm synthesis and an aft
ertouch sensitive keyboard, more memory, bigger hard drives and so on.
Oddly enough there may be more complete surviving synclavier systems around now, than fairlights due to the build quality of the former. Trevor Horn, Daniel Miller & Frank Zappa owned them & you can hear them on dozens of albums by depeche mode , ABC , Seal , and many other artists.
Hopefully we will have a Synclavier around at some point so we can make a video with it.
And Stewart Copeland, on "WALL STREET" music score (1987 - dir.Oliver Stone)
I read somewhere the most paid for a Synclavier was 500.000 dollars.
I read someplace that the Fairlight incorporated analog filters into its architecture. Is that true, or was it purely digital? What about the Synclavier architecture?
Is there any love for the FM and additive synthesis of the Synclavier? The demos I see on UA-cam aren't particularly impressive, and the artists who famously used the Synclavier seemed to use the sampling exclusively. Considering the (comparatively) affordable analog synths on the market at the time, I imagine the early Synclaviers would have been a hard sell.
Fairlight & 80s samples lovers... Watch it !
Hat off & thanks for this epic moment ! ;-))
awesome demo! what a beast of a machine!
2:53 - Inner City!
Absolutely sonically divine !!
I feel like I’m in a room with a horror movie and king crimson playing through the same speakers
I liked you in that Comedy Central show
The BEATGONG sample is originally the Galactic Cymbal from the Synclavier ll keyboard.
Its Michael Jacksons's "Beat It" opening chords, never guessed it was a Fairlight
The korg M1 makes this synth look ancient 😅 imagine a new Cmi with windows 11
such a cool instrument!
must be awesome to make a track on it. running up that hill was made on that masterpiece. there are still lot of usable instruments/sounds
0:38 owner of a lonely heart 😁
Actualy many of these sounds can be found in the Fairlight factory library.
For instance the sample "BEATGONG", the sampled Synclavier gong, is the "GONGSYN" sample in the 1.4 library. But others as well, like "PETER1", "GMUFFA", "P1", etc...
Love MJ..... but I'm here because of Kate Bush
Me too
Revco for me. Dig Kate too@
And Peter Gabriel 😉
@@carls7860 3rd and 4th album is my jam, the South Bank Show documentary was amazing to see Gabriel's synth lab at the time
The orchestral hit from The dreaming is played here.
The samples & the machine are great, but I've been soo waiting to see you actually using that lightpen! :-(
Found this thing in the Arcturia Analog Lab, was drawn in by the way it looked in the display, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a synthesizer or sampler that sounds anything like this
Does it play Oregon trail though?
Amazing piece of keyboard history, but I'd be remiss if I didn't also say AMAZING LAMP!
I love lamp
OMG! Look at the size of that floppy disk! Look at that GUI!
Used to own 5 1/4" floppies back in the day, they were large enough
I am sooo amezed about this amezing hardware alone considering it’s features wich were mind blowing at the time , and those recorded samples sounded very good despites being 8bit.
but if I hear running up that hill, that beautiful sound is just a sample? A sample from what? I cant imagine that is a sample.
Prince used Starlight CMI in a song called Strange Relationship, using sitar and flute sound.
Pet shop boys used this extensively in the 80s...good memories
Hi There this is Mr C. T. Boxill-Harris, I was wondering if they need to do the exact same version of Everybody's Got To Learn Sometime, why don’t they just Replace the Synthesiser String Sound to an Musette Accordion sound, and also Replace the Xylophone Sound to an 4 Times More Deeper Chime Bell or Even a 5 Times More Deeper Still Drum Sound, Because it is Still my Very Very Very Very Very Very Very Favourite Song Ever Since I was about 11 Years of Age Thank You 😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏😉👍😉👏👏
That's a digital stylus
on a CRT display
in 1983!!!
What took Windows so long????
That's a light pen. You could get a Windows-compatible USB light pen all the way into the late 90's, early-zeroes, there was one company that still made them. I used to install them for dentists.
Light pens date back to the late 50s. Look up the USAF “SAGE” computer systems, they used them extensively
@@jaecenwhite2590 The modem and digital communications date to ww2 as well. In fact, teletype was used as early as the Civil war.
Many of these technologies are old. It is to make them useful and adopted by many in friendly way that may take time. Palmtop was like the iPhone much before, but iPhone added the great itunes with the many apps and added good product making and it was adopted by many. As for the mouse it was since seventies by Xerox, only for its own products, but in that case Apple, and later Microsoft followed with good adaptations for their products and was successful fast.
What about touch pad? I think its good but could be much better use of it, so now mouse is more useful than touch pad most of the times.
and what about electric cars? They are around for mass production certainly since the 50s or 60s, maybe much before.
@@claypf4795 And the same technology was used in the guns supplied with early video game consoles, way back to the 1970s.
I have a series lll sitting behind me....this is making me want to boot it up and play. I haven't used it in 10 years. I miss it but it's just such a large system, the display was fried, so it has to be daisy-chained to another monitor. I wonder if the flat panel VGA display cards are still around for a series lll and what they're going for? That would help. That Fairlight was a joy to work with.
Amazing, thanks. Love synths.
Very cool and in such amazing condition, nice!
Thanks for the demo.
You got to take your hat of to this synth. Think of all the bits that came from this thing ? Also think of all the other synths that came along too after this. Today stuff is only like this now because of this wonder machine.
I find it funny with the beatgong sample. It’s a Fairlight CMI sampling a Synclavier II.
It also showed up on the Emulator and the Mirage, getting progressively more mangled due to resampling. The original version was quite pristine in comparison.
An excellent demo :) Well filmed, good audio, interesting content, deserve much more popularity than the other Fairlight ugly demos ;D You should do a special video about the Michael Jackson disk you have (if you still have the fairlight, I read it was sold ^^)
Glad you liked the demo, we did sell it, so we no longer have the Fairlight or that disk.
Alright :) Just a lil' question: have you recorded the samples? :D
Perfect !
There are some sounds from Terminator 2... when orch or string instruments played back on a very low key...
That would be on the Series III but you are close.
brassfall12
The best synth/sampler someone said back in the 80's well its been a while
Amazing... as I first heard about the Fairlight as a young aspiring musician, I was completely blown away. It was like absolute magic, the stuff electronic music dreams were made of. Something I could never afford even if I lived for a thousand years. And now as I am listening, I am like... oh... hm... this stuff sure hasn't aged well.
Cool! It cost like tens of thousands back then yes?, and for many sounds that we get on a small portable toy nowadays. Isn’t that amazing? Damn I was so f’in poor then. I could barely afford to eat, but loved synths so much. Still do. I only could dream about owning one of these, (or any serious programmable synth for that matter) back then. -Closest that I could get, was to hang around the local music shops and drool. I still love the music that hit the airwaves back then featuring such technology. It was a golden time of change, variety and imagination. Cheers.
Yeah, these days one can afford a virtual synthesizer for a lot less than what used to be the decent "cheap" synths back in the day, such as the Micromoog or the SH101. On the other hand, popular music is ruined. Possibly irreversably.
How have I never heard of this?? It's the Joe Hisaishi used in a love of his 80s and 90s music (Nausicaa, Laputa, Totoro...). What a sweet find.
I can't think of few people who did better work with this instrument than Kristian Schutlze and his band Cusco. The sound of this instrument- and its successor the CMI III- are all over his records. And some of them were recorded just with the Fairlight.
Kontakt's great great grandfather.
With emphasis on the "great".
The sound of my childhood
Man, modern technology almost seems alien compared to what they had then. As far as I could tell, the Fairlight IIx cost $46,000 (not adjusted for inflation) and had 208 kilobytes of RAM. My Toraiz SP-16 was $1,300 and has 8 GB of RAM. That's roughly 3% the cost and with 8 million kilobytes of RAM. (edit: after using proper 2017 & 1982 exchange rates and adjusting for inflation the percentage is even smaller i.e. it was expensive!)
Where is music technology gonna be in 30 years? I hope wall warts are gone by then. And all power, patch, and audio cables are based in quantum mechanics so my floating sci-fi speakers will automatically pick up the output of my gear at perfect 1:1 quality and instantaneously..
And that price is without adjusting for inflation. RAM and computers are definitely cheaper and smaller, you didn't mention how huge and heavy this Fairlight was.
1/4 inch cables are well over 100 years old, I have a feeling we'll still be using them 30 years from now. 😁
+Matt Price You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope some day you'll join us and the world will *have quantum signals*
The difference is that I would not touch your Toraiz or whatever with a 10 foot pole. While I'd embrace the Fairlight with open arms. Same as comparing Apple Watch with Patek Philippe chronograph. I'd take the Fairlight and Patek, thank you very much. Oh, and you can throw into it a 288 GTO from year 1985.
And as soon as some company bypasses the transformer called air, and gets to our auditory nerve directly, it's all over for us. That's the ultimate price of a shortsighted "progressive" thinking.
that ilok cracked me up
0:00 to 6:33 what a absolute unit
The Fairlight CMI and the Synclavier II no doubt the most used synth workstations for movie soundtracks and music studios in the early 1980's. After the rise of the Japanese smaller synths (Yamaha, Roland, Korg) these workstation units would be primarily be used for Movie soundtrack work. Nothing will beat the original hardware but our emulations are decent enough to at least get some of Nostalgic sound.
dude- this is the sound of a whole cultural generation (70s-80s early 90s?)
6:10 is the Scritti Politti drum sample from "Hypnotize". As I understand it, Cupid & Psyche 85 was pretty much all done on a Fairlight. Love all the production on that record
Explains why I love it so much then! Ahaha …. ‘Shout’ by Devo was done similarly the year before…. But ‘Cupid’ definitely had a lot of live playing over it to make it sound quite organic
i love run from strings 4 so much, after searching for the sample forever i used it in my own stuff
It's just so wild that today all of these instrument sounds now can be had on a hard drive that fits in your back pocket...
Syntox actually they all fit on a micro SD card that you can easily swallow...
The Very First digital audio workstation aka [DAW] BEFORE Cubase FL studio and Ableton Live
Could you guys do another CMI IIx video? This is just fantastic.