Fairlight CMI Build 5 - It was always about WaveTables!
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- Опубліковано 26 лис 2021
- !*!*!*!*!*!*!*! WAVETABLES *!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!
Time to have a play with one of the least used features of the Early Fairlight CMI.
Check the end of the video if you want me to release a sample pack of custom sounds! :D
Thanks for sharing hands on wavetable creation on the CMI!
Unbelievable how far ahead of it's time the CMI was. Thank you for the great video!
Indeed, There is nothng like them. As I have said a few times I wish I could share with everyone the fun and inspiration you get from using a Fairlight :D
Thanks for that in-depth look at one of the lesser show features of the CMI.
Thanks for checking out the clip, glad you enjoyed :D
This is incredible! Please keep sharing the Fairlight stuff. Love it!
Fairlight for ever ....Always :D
Now I understand how the waveforms that I saw on publicity photos of Jarres Fairlight screens were made!
I know. I always wanted to play with this stuff since I was a kid and saw Jean-Michel demo it on TV in the 70's :D
@@100ThingsIDo Haha, me too! I'm super excited to see the emulations available now! BTW: Which "Fairlight" do you use?
@@tangiblewaves3581 Hey Robert, I have one of your AE Modular systems in the studio! As to the Fairlights I use the Ix (6809 IIx core with CMI 1 Voice Card) quite a bit but on my new release I have been also working withe my Series III a lot as well. For me the Ix is for sound manipulation, very short sounds and creating wave tables.. the Series III I use for long and multi-samples and sequencing due to the 16 voices :D
@@100ThingsIDo Oh, the real thing! As there was not the original CRT with lightpen visible, I was wondering if you are doing the demo with an emulation ;-) Great to hear you have an AE - I feel honored!
Thank you for this demo! I would love a sample pack.
Wonderful, thanx for that in depth explanation. I only know the CMI from recordings and I immediately bought the Arturia version, when it came out. But it’s hard to program. Seeing you doing it on the actual unit helps a lot in understanding the complex philosophy of operation. Keep it coming, you certainly have a new follower from Germany here.
Thanks tihinter, I'll do my best :D
The intro was a HIT seriously!
Damn
I'm not quite sure about that! hehe :D
I would love to mess around with some Fairlight wavetable samples! Your Fairlight videos have been really fun to watch; keep up the great work!
Thanks man! I will see what I can do soon :D
Thoroughly enjoyed this journey with you, wavetable programming on the CMI was neat to actually view how the interface operates. Keep up the great channel!
Thanks man! There is something quite enjoyable about putting this level of thought (and randomness) to what you are doing and creating a totally unique sound :D
This was super dope! If you made a sample pack i'd use it in my other wavetable synths like Serum. I love the audio characteristics of the fairlight and I had no clue it could work like this! It really has a esoteric feel and it sounds like the precursor of the synths that would follow! Love how the new build went btw:)
Noted! I will try and make it a wavetable and and a sample of the wave tables in use pack .. will take me a little while (always new projects on the cook) but will try and get it done soon! :D
Always been curious about the synthesis on the Fairlight. Would love to hear more, and also learn about MCL. Thanks.
I'll see what I can do about an MCL clip. To be honest the 1x screen glitches on it and I still have not fixed it.. but there has been a development in the last few weeks that should help :D
Whoa you know how to drive the amazing Fairlight so well!
Thanks man! Its really strange but the Fairlight always seems so logical and perfect when I use it :D I never get bored of them and they always do something special when you work with them!
This was very interesting to see. I like that you can just dial in and play with numbers and sounds. Would of course like to get a sample pack to add some CMI sounds to my tracks.
Thanks! Indeed yes a heap of fun! I'm working on the sample pack .. I hope to have it done in a month :D
This is brilliant and really well explained!
Thanks for that! Glad you enjoyed :D
Sample Pack! Beautiful! :)
I will see what I can do .. might take a little while but I'll make it special :D
Love the history.
Hey S2S, Indeed... nothing like a Fairlight :D
So awesome! Thanks for posting this. 😎
My Pleasure :D
I, and many others presumably, would like any deep dives into the Fairlight architecture that you have time for.
I will see what I can do, the trick is trying to make it intersting enough and not dry with me talking about Duel processor briges and the genious of Tony Furse :D
Enjoying this again mate.. wow... Now.. I'll try again to try and persuade the Series III to do this... (I know, I know...).. :)
I really love this Franken Fairlight! You really should try an get a Series II or IIx at some point. So much fun :D
That was fun!! Thanks!
Glad you enjoyed it :D
I had a sampler in 1987 based on the Apple II by Greengate. It was £1700 in 1987. I never managed to produce a wave table by harmonic addition that sounded any good. The cursor-operated wave drawing option never yielded anything with enough useful over tones to filter with a low pass filter. Greengate sent one to Denmark to sample canon for the 1812 overture that the BBC were recording. My best work was with the very limited Akai S900. 12.4 seconds at 12 kHz bandwidth via 12 bit, all into 750 K . The limitations forced innovation. My current sampler can sample for 3 days at CD quality- my mouth is stuffed with gold!
There was a good chat with Greengate on RMC The Cave on UA-cam if I remeber correctly! I would love one of those units but super rare! :D
@@100ThingsIDo the looping was helped by two adjacent windows on the screen where the start and ends of the loop were displayed adjacent to one another , matching the amplitudes was easy and so a click free loop was easy to find
Didn´t know the Fairlight could do this! realtime wavetable sweeping is great. Yeah, I´d love to have a sample pack to load into my Ensoniqs and modulate the wavetable position with any mod source...
Thanks for the support Juno6, Sounds good I will see what I can do soon :D
This was fascinating! I had no idea it was that responsive to MIDI CC. Thank you for sharing!
I hear ya! Blew my mind when I discoevered that it all just worked out of the box! :O :D
Thank you, this was super interesting. I should spend more time with the K5000.
Thanks :D and thats for the support. Indeed, I do hope my videos inspire people to investigate the gear they own more!
This was very interesting - Would like to see more! And yes, I'd be interested in a sample pack!
Thanks man! :D I will indeed see what I can do about a sample pack. I think original .vc's and some WAV outputs should do !
that was interesting. yes wavetable is interesting
Thanks Bruno for the support, Indeed I will get started on the wavetable pack! :D
A sample pack would be amazing, I knew that you could do this with the CMI, but it is way more complex than I believed it was, thank you. I wonder if you can do this in any of the CMI emulators?
Hey Trevor, thanks for the support. Check qasar beach... it does all of this and you can use a mouse instead of a lightpen (it also runs about 1000 times faster) :D
@@100ThingsIDo Thanks, will do.
Really interesting. Technology has come so far but, really, not as far was expected. This process is no so different today as it was when the Fairlight was first around. Love wavetables!
Thanks Jonathan, indeed so far forward.. but not always better! The ideas the Fairlight team put into the operating system really gives the instrument a soul :D
Thanks Michael. Super-interesting and a great demo. Since you ask, a sample pack isn't something I think I'd care about. I think you said that Fairlight did away with additive synthesis in later models, although it was always a big part of the vision of the original series. This is clearly wavetable synthesis, but also additive synthesis. Hopefully you can show us how this and the sampling can be used together to resynthesize samples in a later video. I have a few questions. 1. When sample looping is enabled, usually you would want to be careful to choose zero-crossings or ensure the values at each end of the loop region are fairly close in value, but I don't hear evidence of any issues with that when you scan through the wavetable. Does is auto-detect the closest zero-crossing or something? 2. Peter Vogel relates in an interview (I think the one on the National Film and Sound Archives site) that some of the original midi spec was based on Fairlight's protocol they used in the series I for keyboard note on-off information. Maybe also whatever controllers were on the Series I keyboard like pitch/mod wheel. Have you seen any evidence of that?
Love to see more on this. Can you load samples into the wavetable?
Yep, I will do indeed... a few more videos in this series yet but it will be a while before I release more! As you might know the original sampling page was not intended for making sounds .. more having a look at what waves make up the sound so you could synthesize new sounds and make similar sounds :D As the the questions 1. The wave segments don't fit perfectly but when scanning you are listening to such fast playing chunks that you don't hear the cruddy loop ploint (check the demo at the start of the clip for example. 2. It would not surpise me, all the communications to the outside world are serial .. Midi is bascially a super fast serial in many ways. Series 1 keyboard is all just 3 sliders and 2 buttons no mod or pitch wheel unless you assign the function to one of them.. and no zero point.. the Series III was the first keyboard to have traditional pitch and mod + some rotary pots for the other controls :D
@0richbike indeed you can ... I will demo in the future along with SAMPLING and a few other fun things :D
Excellent demo, realy interesting.
The process of creating waves seems less tedious than in my Kawaï K5 where you have to adjust each of the 128 harmonics in time and volume, without any possibility to morph from a wave to another, and without a big screen.
Thanks for the continued support and yes... morphing between the waves is where all the fun is! The fairlight is so much fun. If you have not had a play with Qasar Beach I would suggest checking it out! :D
@@100ThingsIDo I did'nt know Qasar Beach, I'll give it a try, thank you!
Haha! "Pretty Easy Stuff"!
It issssssssss :D
This is super cool, Can you export the wave tables from the fairlight and what format is it all????
The fairlight saves into .vc format (original Fairlight sound file). From here you can extract it from the fairlight and turn it into a .WAV then on convert that to what ever you like :D
Does anybody know if there is a software out there that simulates the fairlight approach of designing a wavetable? Samplepack would perfectly match with my Waldorf M!
Check out Qasar Beach.. Even Peter Vogel was impressed with it :D I'll do my best to get the sample pack done and share when I can!
How did the 3d visualization in these work? I wonder how it computes the entire 3d shape of the WF.
My understanding of the way the CMI's displayed the 3D wave visualisation is as follows. The sample is broken down into 128 segments (each like a single cycle wave) inside the Fairlights memory. They used a FFT ( fast fourier transform ) to turn the wave into visual data then plotted it on the graphics display in sequence. Unlike most other computer based synths of the time the CMI had a high resoution video board so it was a lot easier to display fast! I hope this helps! :D
@@100ThingsIDo Very interesting and thanks for the answer! Did you read this from a manual or anything, and if so do you have a link? this system is very intriguing to me, amazing for the time it was made
@@whogaze I chat to the people that used to work for Fairlight quite a bit. I think it was in one of the recent interviews with Peter Vogel he goes into this in a little bit of detail. The whole waveform synthesis was changed to the FFT term by the time the Series III came along as they had dropped the Harmonic synthesis mostly by this point! Hope that helps. The Series IIx service manual goes into theory of operation and massive amounts of detail of how the system works.
Does the Arturia software do this?
I don't believe so! Its more a sampler.. You can actually do similar things with the Arturia Synclavier believe it or not :D
You can create a new patch, e.g.
C,A,NEWV
Indeed, but its faster to have a blank patch I normally call A to load I find. Then its always s,a,NewName with each wave or sample :D