Now Playing. "Sample Bank" by LCI
About the song.
I hope I unlocked something in all my composer readers (all 2 of you), talking about Page R and Hydrogen. Fairlight CMI-style composing really is one of the easiest kinds of computer art you can make; you don't even need a MIDI controller, just samples on your disk and a song in your heart. While we've already heard my cover of "Pocket Calculator", I thought maybe we should hear a more '80s-centric song—something using only the Fairlight, no other instruments. "Sample Bank" is my cover of Yasunori Mitsuda's "Mushroom Bank" theme from Mario Party 1, showcasing all of the most overused sounds from the CMI's preset sample disks. We've got ORCH2, SYNBELL5, and ELEBASS4 in here, as well as some mechanical samples that sounded kind of like banking and commerce. I couldn't squeeze SARARR or HONKY1 in here, but, well, there's other songs. The only cheaty thing I did was I ran it through an equaliser to bump the bass a bit. But I didn't do anything to this song that a first-time Fairlight producer in 1981 couldn't have done.
On to the blog post.
I did sort of gloss over this bit in the previous entry—apart from just the sequencer, which a lot of more traditional keyboardists didn't ever bother using, the Fairlight's most celebrated feature was its ability to make a musical instrument out of anything. While the New England Digital Synclavier was the very first sampling synthesiser ever sold, the Fairlight CMI combined the sampler with a home computer, giving it a visual aspect that the Synclavier couldn't. This made it easier to organise samples by type and even to resample and edit them, to say nothing of recording them. You weren't beholden to interpreting a series of blinkenlights like you were Scotty on the Enterprise to figure out what the computer was doing or if it needed help with something; you could see what was going on in the filesystem just by watching the screen. Some composers never had to play the musical keyboard component at all, and could carry out an entire song with the QWERTY keyboard (or "typewriter keyboard" as they called it back in 1980) using an optional software program called "Music Composition Language". While it's not real clear how many composers used MCL instead of Page R, Page R certainly would streamline the process, insofar as all you had to do to define a note was to press the desired key. Really, MCL only happened because Peter Vogel couldn't play the piano proficiently enough to write any music with it, so he developed a new programming language. That's just how they rolled back in the '80s.
The only problem with the Fairlight was its immense cost: the CMI Series I and II both cost A$26.000. The Series IIx cost A$35.000 Each one had to be built to order, all the documentation printed, shipped from Australia to the company's regional office, then delivered to the studio or the private residence where it was to be installed. Each component had its own hardcase, which added to the weight tariffs. Nonetheless, this didn't stop multi-platinum studios snapping them up. At one point in the mid-'80s, Capitol Records had ten CMIs, and a large number of successful, wealthy recording artists also had at least one (Jan Hammer and Stevie Wonder had two).
At a presentation with Thomas Dolby in 2011, Peter Vogel related an interesting story about a "really famous pop-star" whose name he refused to disclose. He mentioned how this pop-star had requested a CMI for demonstration; not an unknown event, since it was so expensive. After the trial period ended, he went back to Mic—uh, uh, the uh, the famous pop-star's studio and said, "Well, do you fancy it?" Pop-star said he did and he'd like to have it, but he was under the impression that his tremendous fame would dazzle Peter into giving it to him gratis. However, Peter told him in plain terms, "We can't afford to do that. And I'm sorry to tell you, but all of our customers are famous pop-stars; if not before they get a Fairlight, then shortly afterwards." Peter repossessed the CMI and that was the end of it. Yes, I almost said "Michael Jackson" there. I have a few reasons for believing the unidentified male pop-star was Jacko; first, he was incredibly cheap when it came to studio equipment. The electronic gong sound that opens "Beat It" came from the Synclavier II demo flexidisc and he really had no studio electronics of his own apart from a minimoog and a Roland TR-808, relying on his session musicians and producers to supply their own electronics. The other reason is that this gong sound was later made available to Fairlight customers as SYNBELL5 on Disc 24 of the Series IIx sample library; and it seems it was sampled directly from the opening note of "Beat It", rather than the Synclavier flexidisc, where the tone is allowed to play down to silence. It is for this reason that certain commentators thought Jacko used the Fairlight on that song, but if you examine the totality of his work from the period, you cannot find a Fairlight CMI anywhere. That's weird, spuds. Like, I cannot undersell how peculiar it is that the biggest name of the 1980s never used a Fairlight CMI. Since Peter ended his story saying that the "really famous pop-star" carried on trash-talking Fairlight for years afterward, it's a safe bet.
I said earlier that most keyboardists never bothered to sequence anything and just played the CMI like any other synthesiser. I should point out that polyphonic synths were fairly uncommon at the time the Fairlight was current. Roland and KORG were basically the only companies that offered one; the Jupiter-8 and Polysix were polyphonic, but they still sounded like synthesisers. The Fairlight CMI, when played as a keyboard instrument, was capable of playing 8 simultaneous notes with any instrument you liked, synthetic or acoustic. By technical necessity, its piano sounds weren't very good, but you probably had a piano already. Plus, the CMI had the ability to, essentially, create entirely new instruments by playing samples of acoustic instruments far outside their natural ranges, or by turning something like a salad bowl being struck with a pencil eraser into an 88-note musical instrument. Here in the 21.2nd century, we can download phone apps for free that allow us to do sampling like this, so we take it for granted a bit; but, back in the '80s, no one had ever heard of that. Even the term, "sampling", had to be constantly defined every time the Fairlight had a TV special done about it. "We can tell the computer to analyse a natural sound and convert it into a form that it can understand," or, "The computer is essentially reconstructing the sound as a series of binary codes." Yes, that's a highly abstract way to describe sampling, but it was the only way you could define it for people in the '80s. To come on television and say, "The computer takes a recording of a sound and can change its pitch," makes it sound more of a magical process than it really is. As we had no way to make a musical instrument out of a stapler spring back then until the Fairlight showed up, people like Peter Gabriel made loads of money on electronic experimentation records, where they would take odd, non-musical sounds like televisions being smashed or a bit of sheet metal being struck with a timpani mallet. It was definitely a novelty. Plus, the CMI afforded users the ability to assign particular sounds to sections of the keyboard, suddenly allowing a keyboardist to play a set of rock drums, in amongst various other things.
The Fairlight's enduring notoriety has led to software development, directed at 1980s gear turbo-nerds. My killer app for iPhone 6 was the CMI Pro. There's a VSTi version offered by Arturia. Certainly soundfonts have been made of it, and its sounds were recently liberated from the original disks and converted to WAV for use in modern samplers. With all this software, it's odd that the '80s retrospective totally passed it by. In all the various '80s-styled TV themes, top-40 hits, and videogame music, never once do you hear ORCH2, SARARR, ELEBASS4, or even SYNBELL5. I can understand composers forgetting about the Linn LM-1; its samples are pretty hard to come by these days; but the Fairlight has always been just sitting right there for anyone to find, and no one bothered to even look for it. Well, I say that it was "totally passed by". I was writing Page R-style music in Hydrogen at the height of the retrospective, and I used the Fairlight samples quite often. I'm sure there were other composers who didn't forget about it either, but from a standpoint of sheer airtime, the Fairlight dropped off everyone's radar in the '90s and never returned to it. It went from being the second most-recorded instrument in the record store to being just another low-priority subject on Wikipedia within the span of 30 years, and I feel really bad for it. I guess it's not alone; the Yamaha DX7, E-MU Emulator II, Synclavier, and a whole mess of drum machines also had the retro train pass them by. Overworked, underpaid composers on projects like Stranger Things couldn't be bothered and just pretended like the Roland Juno-G could make authentic '80s sounds.
--15 April 2024--