Fairlight synthesizer

Fairlight CMI
Fairlight CMI Series II exhibited at NAMM Show in 2011
Manufacturer	Fairlight
Dates	1979–89, 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~) MIDI • SMPTE (CMI IIx~)

The Fairlight CMI (short for Computer Musical Instrument) is a digital synthesizer, sampler and digital audio workstation 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 was one of the earliest music workstations with an embedded digital sampling synthesizer. 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 initiated the idea to develop a build-it-yourself analogue synthesizer called the ETI 4600 for his family's magazine Electronics Today International. The detailed design was developed by ETI's Barty Wilkinson and Trevor Marshall but Ryrie 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 and a brief stint at university in 1975, Ryrie asked Vogel if he would be interested in making "the world's greatest synthesiser" based on the recently announced Microprocessor. He recalled: "We 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 design a machine which would do 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.