MATRIXSYNTH: Fairlight Sample demo


Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Fairlight Sample demo


YouTube via dbeckster
"Turn up the volume and you'll here the drums: bad audio. A Fairlight, my good children, was a sampler back in the day (made by PPG) that had the most unique and incredible sounds ever. It was even better than a Moog synthesizer, but the cost was killer. Luckily, I found some Fairlight samples on my dad's Emax. Please, enjoy and tell me how I did."
PPG? Anyone know if there was any affiliation whatsoever?

3 comments:

  1. You silly kids. There was no connection between Palm Products GMBH
    (Germany) and Fairlight (Australia), other than that they both made killer, forward-looking gear that helped define the sound of the 80s.

    ReplyDelete
  2. No connection between PPG and Fairlight. Two different companies, two different instruments, two different continents.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The Fairlight was the creation of an Aussie named Peter Vogel. It was originally conceived as a general-purpose digital audio processing instrument, not as a sampler per se. The sampling software was just one (the only?) of the software packages that actually got finished. The processing architecture wasn't really optimal for sample playback, and it had some annoying side effects, such as the fact that a sample had to be loaded into each voice card individually. E-mu eventually came along with a far more efficient processing setup for sample playback, and the result was the Emulator -- which sold for a fraction of what a Fairlight cost.

    An interesting bit was that Fairlight almost invented the VA... Larry Fast did some work with them on software that would allow the processors to be assigned to perform VCO, VCF, VCA, etc., functions, and configure the routing like a modular. But it never got finished. In a way, it's no surprise that Fast is now a fan of the Kurzweil VAST architecture, since it's what he wanted the Fairlight to do.

    ReplyDelete

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