The best thing to come out of Australia besides Adam Hills

[dmlandrum]

I'm speaking, of course, of the Fairlight CMI:



The first version was 8-bit sound with 8 voices of polyphony. It used a unique system by which the output DACs were variably-clocked in order to change the playback pitch of the samples, rather than using a resampling algorithm as the Emulator and most other samplers did. By version 3, it had 16-bit sound, and 16 voices of polyphony, which was expandable.

I would really love one of these for my home studio, but the sad part is, if I had wanted one 12-13 years ago, I could've had one just about given to me. Now, they're back in demand.

[EEVblog]

Hear that 8" floppy crunching away!

Classic 80's gear, clothes, hair...

Dave.

[Kiriakos-GR]

   
The best thing to come out of Australia

To my knowledge, are only the Brave Australian troops at WWW2 .

And the Brave, David L. Jones    

[Polossatik]

It used a unique system by which the output DACs were variably-clocked in order to change the playback pitch of the samples, rather than using a resampling algorithm as the Emulator and most other samplers did. By version 3, it had 16-bit sound, and 16 voices of polyphony, which was expandable.

so basically the played around with the sampling frequency? aka sampled at like 20Khz and then pushed it trough the DAC's running them at 10Khz or 30?

[dmlandrum]

Exactly. Each voice card had its own 6500 (or 68000 for the Series III) processor and its own RAM (128k per card on the first rev, I think), which is what made them so expensive. The output DAC clocks were able to go up to 192kHz, and could be very precisely controlled. They couldn't figure out how to make a common RAM pool for all the voices, though, which is why each card was basically self-contained, and also why the system was so expensive. There was also a central control computer, which ran the interface and controlled the cards.

The big sampler breakthrough after that was from Emu, who had figured out how to have each output voice read data from a common RAM pool. All of a sudden, you needed one processor instead of nine, and a lot less RAM. This is why the first Emulator cost $8,000 instead of $30,000. They also opted to use a resampling engine to change the pitch of samples on the fly before output, which didn't sound as good as the Fairlight. Of course, these days that's a moot point, with computing power high enough to run really good resamplers.

The real beauty of the Fairlight, according to people who used it, was really in the software and interface, rather than in the hardware itself. It had software on board where users could sculpt sound in a variety of ways, from drawing waveforms to drawing envelopes for harmonics and so on, and the computer would then calculate the samples to play back. Pretty slick stuff for the time.

[Kiriakos-GR]

Well , speaking about music production , I prefer my Cubase with the X-Fi music and ASIO drivers,
driving the pack with my Oxygen49 key M-Audio ...

The only problem are , that I have very few free time, even so I have record two or three complete songs.
 
 

[EEVblog]

The real beauty of the Fairlight, according to people who used it, was really in the software and interface, rather than in the hardware itself. It had software on board where users could sculpt sound in a variety of ways, from drawing waveforms to drawing envelopes for harmonics and so on, and the computer would then calculate the samples to play back. Pretty slick stuff for the time.

Yeah I was really amazed at the light pen user interface and being able to draw the harmonic waveforms. I thought he was just going to punch in a few text commands!
Amazing for the time.

Dave.

[dmlandrum]

I also have modern music making tools, including an Emu e6400 Ultra sampler, which is basically Emu's final rev hardware sampler before software took over. 16-bit, 44.1/48kHz sampling, with some of the cleanest resampling algorithms ever written. It also has time-stretching, and a large suite of filters for shaping sound.

I love doing DSP stuff. Although I'll note that I've never actually coded for a DSP chip.

[dmlandrum]

Yeah I was really amazed at the light pen user interface and being able to draw the harmonic waveforms. I thought he was just going to punch in a few text commands!
Amazing for the time.

I've looked all over and I have yet to find any software instrument/plug-in for modern DAWs that approaches the flexibility of the Fairlight. I can only imagine something exists out there, but I have yet to run across it.

There are plenty of softsynths that let you hand-draw single-cycle waveforms, so no worries there. But the Fairlight could hold 128 such hand-drawn (or even sampled) waveforms, or you could draw in two, one at slot 0 and one at slot 127, and have it interpolate the remainder, or plug in three or four and have it interpolate throughout, and so on. Then you could tell it to go through them at a given rate and write out the final sample for playing. I've never seen anything else like it. (EDIT: I tried to find the video that demonstrates this, but it seems to have disappeared on me.)

In the end, there's really nothing magical about it. It's all FFT tricks and cubic fit functions and so on. So I don't get why nobody else went down that route that I've seen.

Anyway, this is what I've been obsessed over the past few months.

[DJPhil]

In the end, there's really nothing magical about it. It's all FFT tricks and cubic fit functions and so on. So I don't get why nobody else went down that route that I've seen.

I remember starting with .mod trackers like Impulse Tracker when I was younger, and eventually found a copy of The Computer Music Tutorial in one of the local college libraries. Man that was a big book, and I guess it's a seminal work nowadays. I learned a great deal about audio tinkering around, and it shaped my musical tastes ever since. Good times.

I have a theory on why you don't see that kind of flexibility very much anymore. I think that in this particular case it had a lot to do with cost, but it was a busy time for innovation in synthesis as well. The greats of analog synthesis were in the process of fighting or embracing digital technology. Many musicians would have struggled to put the flexibility of such a system to good use, having little knowledge of the physics or computer science involved. Add to that the sequencers of the day like the Roland 303, which was much more simple and limited but also cheaper, more accessible, and had it's own growing reputation. There's an analogy in Alesis' Autotune, but I kind of shudder when I think of what that's become. I think the last thing I heard autotune in that I liked was Daft Punk, but I've got wicked odd tastes.

Have you played with Buzz lately? When I stopped making things, it'd just been out a year or so, and I haven't checked back in since. I only ever really dabbled with what I could get for free. Man, I think I can still remember the keyboard shortcuts of Fast Tracker.

I know this was kind of a mindless ramble, I'm just kind of glad to see someone else with a passion for synthesis.

[charliex]

It seems like its a pretty comon love for the keyboards amongst ee/cs's . I haven't done much of it recently, except for just playing around with Korg DS10, its a lot of fun, sit and amuse myself for hours.

[dmlandrum]

Really, even though I would jump at the chance to have a Fairlight in my studio, I'd be more inclined to pick up something like the Kyma instead, which can do everything the Fairlight can do and more (I had forgotten this was out there, actually). $3000 is pricey, but not unreasonable for something this powerful, though still out of my price range for now.