*** Welcome to piglix ***

Fairlight CMI

Fairlight CMI
Fairlight green screen.jpg
Fairlight CMI Series II
exhibited at NAMM Show in 2011
Manufacturer Fairlight
Dates 1979–88, 2011–present
Price GB£ 18,000 ~ 60,000
Technical specifications
Polyphony 8 ~ 16 voices
Timbrality Multitimbral
LFO for vibrato
Synthesis type Additive synthesis
Sampling (8bit@16kHz
    ~16bit@100kHz)

Waveform editing/drawing
Additive resynthesis (FFT)
Filter low-pass for anti-aliasing
Input/output
Keyboard 73 keys non-weighted, velocity sensitive.
Option: slave keyboard
Left-hand control 3 sliders & 2 buttons,
numeric keypad (right side)
External control Computer keyboard
Light pen
CV/Gate (option, CMI II~)
MIDISMPTE (CMI IIx~)

The Fairlight CMI (short for Computer Musical Instrument) was one of the earliest music workstations with an embedded digital sampling synthesizer. It was introduced in 1979 by the founders of Fairlight, Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, developed based on the commercial license of Qasar M8 dual-MC6800 microprocessor musical instrument originally developed by Tony Furse of Creative Strategies in Sydney, Australia. It rose to prominence in the early 1980s and competed in the market with the Synclavier from New England Digital.

In the 1970s, synthesizer devotee Kim Ryrie created a build-it-yourself analogue synthesizer called the ETI 4600 for his magazine Electronics Today International, but was frustrated with the limited number of sounds that could be made with an analogue synth. After his classmate, Peter Vogel, graduated from high school in 1975, Ryrie showed him Wendy Carlos' album Switched-on Bach, which was produced with a Moog synthesizer. Ryrie had always wanted to make a synthesizer better than the Moog, and Vogel had a big passion in electronics. He recalled: "I had long been interested in computers - I built my first computer when I was about 12 - and it was obvious to me that combining digital technology with music synthesis was the way to go." In December of that year, he and Vogel formed a house-based company intended to manufacture digital synthesizers. It was called Fairlight, which the name came from the hydrofoil ferry passing before Ryrie's grandmother's home in Sydney harbour. The two planned to make a machine doing what would now be considered physical modelling synthesis, or acoustic modeling, a digital synthesizer that could create sounds reminiscent of acoustic instruments. They had initially thought of making an analogue synth that was digitally controlled, given that the Moog was much more difficult to control.


...
Wikipedia

...