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Fairlight & Fair Does

Article from Making Music, February 1987

What do one of London's top studios do with a computer room?


London's Air Studios have installed a Fairlight III in their special computer room. Paul Colbert caught a lift to the upper reaches of Oxford Street to learn what they do with it, where they put it, and why III is better than I.

Air's George Martin at the console

MENTION OF the word 'Fairlight' a few years back would have had superstitious types crossing themselves.

Since then, Emulators, cheap sequencers, samplers and digital synths have taken a large byte (ha, ha) out of the Fairlight's mystic. But the name does have a certain authority... So what do you get for your money?

The series III (popularly known as the Turbo System) may resemble the original late seventies model in format, but wildly outdistances it in three principal areas — sound quality, memory and a re-trafficed structure to how its sounds are produced.

There's actually no great mystery to sampling. Essentially, the more memory, the better the resulting noises. Compact Discs sample in their own way, operating at a rate of 44.1KHz. (For technical reasons — mainly leaving room to take out nasty side effects — the sampling rate is generally just over twice that of the highest frequency you can record.) Since the upper limit of hearing is 20KHz, the sums are easy and most experts safely tell us CD is as good as we could possibly want, or appreciate.

With typical, one-up earmanship, AES (Audio Engineering Society) fixed 48KHz as the desirable standard.

At top whack the series III samples at 100KHz.

Knock it down to CD's mere 44.1 and it will record two and a half minutes worth of music. That's 2.5 minutes worth of digitally recorded music, NOT sequenced stuff, but actual sound whose every split second can be radically edited.

The series III employs 14M (Megabytes) of RAM (Random Access Memory) to do that... a colossal amount by present standards. Converting your average rack mounted delay line to 44.1KHz (if it were possible) would give you no more than half a second, if you were lucky.

Why anyone should bother with a 100KHz rate is more a sign of manufacturing prowess than design standards. Sampled information, whether off RAM or CD, needs help from a sophisticated filter network to put it back together again. Chip memory is already the cheapest, mass-produced lump of any computer. And, the higher the sampling rate, the less the demand on the filter network.

So it's not long before it becomes cheaper to inflate the sampling rate with cheap memory than to build clever filters at the far end.

In the original Fairlight — as in this one — a series of voice cards create the actual sound under instructions from a CPU (Central Processing Unit). Unlike the III, the first Fairlight asked the voice cards to hold the samples in their own memories.

The III keeps the samples in its own bulk RAM (the 14M) then doles it out to the voice cards only when needed under instructions from the CPU. Result: larger and more versatile memory, making it much easier to split sounds across the keyboard.

Don't expect to see a burgeoning secondhand market in Is, but there are already signs of musicianly lionising of the original. For example, one trick both machines can play is to analyse the waveform of the digital recording and resynthesise the sound by building up a replica from its own collection of harmonic generators. The III gets it almost perfect, whereas the I got it wrong, false, obviously electronic and a bit vocoderish. Of course some people now prefer the weirdness of the original and have already begun to lament its passing.

Technically the guts of the Fairlight looks like this: a dual 6809 central processor, two 6800s for waveform processing and general interface stuff, and two further 6809s as channel processors. There's more, but that's the heart of the system which leaves you with 512K of system RAM to run the business, 16K for video, 512K for waveform processing, 64K on each channel card (another eight) plus the mighty 14M for sampling. You could run a small company on that amount of computer power, if it wasn't music dedicated. In comparison, a good IBM personal micro will boast ½M of RAM.

At one time it was the sound editing facilities of the Fairlight that caught the public's imagination — the ability to get 'inside' a grand piano, display the waveform as a 3-D representation of harmonics decaying in time, then remodel the sample to your own base desires. Pianos were spliced into broken glass, and unthinkable and largely unpleasant experiments were carried out on recordings of the most personal human functions. Air's aficionados believe that side of the Fairlight's character holds less fascination today. Instead users are obsessed with producing the very highest quality samples. Much of the early waveform tinkering was to repair bad samples anyhow.

Get a good sample to begin with and it's not needed. And if you still insist on peculiar noises, the Fairlight III can quickly resample itself — you layer up a handful of different samples and get the computer to relog that array as one new noise.

But generally speaking, it takes a good studio to get good samples — not much point in recording 100KHz worth of stuff in a shed. Another reason why Fairlights tend to be owned by 'institutions' rather than individuals. There are 56,000 others, but we won't go into them.

Air's MIDI Programming Room

THE FRESHLY installed Fairlight III is part of Air's MIDI programming room, four floors up in their eyrie overlooking London's Oxford Circus. It serves all their studios, but more importantly as far as programmers Dee Long and Gavin Greenaway are concerned, it serves all their musicians. Keyboard players have the natural advantage when a band greets its first Fairlight — the synth and the programming techniques are already half familiar. So the team deliberately take the band members aside one by one to explain how the gadget can help their instrument and style of playing.

An incoming band can use the room however they want. There's enough recording and sequencing power there to go a long way towards a final master if they wish. Some bands will already have their own samples to bring in — MIDI sample transference between rival machines is on its way — or if you actually want to produce a rhythm track from housebricks, go into a studio next door and bang two bricks together while the Fairlight listens.

Not surprisingly, £56,000 collections of chips and bits of a buss do not travel well... not even down the corridor. The room's guiding hand, John Jones, bedded down the mainframe in one spot and ran MIDI links to all the studios... their own MIDI that is. They converted it to the computer based RS422 communication system. A MIDI cable can run about 40ft before it needs a booster. RS422 will run for thousands, and without the delay inherent in long MIDI runs.

Far less expensive than the Fairlight, (but equally cherished) is the Performer software running on the room's Apple Macintosh. A phenomenal program, it offers 200 tracks to record sequences or program information upon, and has perhaps the most sophisticated 'understanding' of musical feel in the world. Each quarter note is divided into 480 clicks (Yamaha's QX1 is 300 and everyday average would be 96). The ability to 'drift' beats and time is remarkable, and an experienced programmer could use it to, say, analyse a drummer's feel — how far in advance or behind he places the beat — and reproduce it. S'very clever.


Also featuring gear in this article


Featuring related gear



Previous Article in this issue

Yamaha RGX-110 six string

Next article in this issue

Moving Up To Eight Track


Publisher: Making Music - Track Record Publishing Ltd, Nexus Media Ltd.

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Making Music - Feb 1987

Gear in this article:

Sampler > Fairlight > CMI Series III


Gear Tags:

16-Bit Sampler

Feature by Paul Colbert

This article features:

AIR Studios

Previous article in this issue:

> Yamaha RGX-110 six string

Next article in this issue:

> Moving Up To Eight Track


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