Hydrogen: the 21st-century Fairlight CMI

Now Playing. "Pocket Calculator" by LCI

Pocketcalculator: Basierend auf dem lied von Kraftwerk

Fairlight CMI Series 2 X

The Fairlight CMI was one of the giants of 1980s music; not just top-10 hits, but film music as well. Tears For Fears used it famously on Songs from the Big Chair, Hans Zimmer wrote the score to Rain Man on it. Mark Mothersbaugh still uses the same one Devo used on Shout. Even the strings ensemble in "Never Gonna Give You Up" is from a Fairlight. '80s gear geeks know all about this instrument, but some things that should not have been forgotten were lost when it came back 'round to the '80s music retrospective. To the current generation of composers, "the '80s" sounds like a-ha's "Take On Me" and, for some reason, the Roland SuperSaw (which was created for the JD-800 in 1991 and was never an '80s instrument). There is no Fairlight in "Take On Me"; that song is completely driven by the Yamaha DX7 synthesiser and Sequential Circuits Drumtraks rhythm computer.

Page R emulated screen
Image source: ghservices.com

First, what made the Fairlight so special? Well, several things, but the one we're focussing on today is what the filesystem called "Page R". This was a step sequencer forerunner to today's MIDI trackers; originally designed as drum machine software, Fairlight repurposed it for music sequencing by allowing composers the ability to change the pitch of each step in regular notation. One place where later software improved upon Page R was that they could display actual musical staves, allowing composers to see the notation, rather than just the presence of a note. Then, more and more development occurred over the next 20 or 25 years until we arrived at our modern idea of digital audio workstations.

Hydrogen

Hydrogen is drum machine software for Linux and Windows, which, on its face, looks like a simple step-based drum machine. And it can be used as that. However, it works in almost exactly the same manner as Fairlight Page R. Once a step has been input, its pitch, stereo position, and volume can be adjusted. Unlike Page R, Hydrogen allows composers to change stereo position on a step-by-step basis, instead of track-by-track. This means, if you want to have an instrument randomly vacillate between the left and right channels, you can do it without needing 8 tracks for a single sound. Also, where Page R was limited to 8 tracks per song, Hydrogen has no track limitation; 1 track, 8 tracks, 16 tracks, 24 tracks, it's all the same to Hydrogen. The only place where Hydrogen falls short (at least in v.0.9.6) is that I never discovered how to loop samples within Hydrogen, where looping is the Fairlight's bread and butter. Also, samples have to play completely out before stopping; however, I found that I could set an instrument to monophonic and set another step with a volume of 0 where I wanted a note to end. That way, the new, silent note would override the first one and I could create the illusion of a shorter note. Something about necessity and innovation, I guess.

For quite a number of years, Hydrogen and my Fantom X were my studio. Whenever I wrote music, I would use one of those or a combination of both. I think I took to it so easily because I was familiar with the iOS Fairlight app (now called "Peter Vogel Instruments CMI" because another company nicked the name "Fairlight" during their hiatus between 1988 and 2011), having become conversant enough to write short songs with it. However, I found Hydrogen easier to use, because... well, it wasn't a mobile app. Plus, there were some intermittent bugs in the Fairlight app that made it hard to use.

The song at the top of the page here is a cover of Kraftwerk's "Pocket Calculator" that I made entirely in Hydrogen, with a combination of samples from the Fairlight CMI, my Yamaha arranger, and an obscure piece of DSiWare called Rytmik: Rock Edition. The lyrics are performed by my iPhone 6's speech synthesiser, and I even make a cameo appearance as a vocal sample during the bridge. With the Fairlight CMI Series IIx's original sample set having been posted to the Internet Archive, and Hydrogen's step sequencer bearing so many similarities to Page R, it's easier than ever for computer users to imitate the sound of a multi-platinum recording studio from 1984. Plus, provided a microphone and Audacity, you can even imitate the celebrated sampling abilities of the Fairlight CMI right in your own studio computer! It's easy, it's fun, but beware—it's not fast. You can easily blow an entire afternoon writing a song this way.

Download Hydrogen from the project site.
Link destination: hydrogen-music.org

--14 April 2024--

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