The original crew behind Fairlight just met up in Sydney. Founders Kim Ryrie and Peter Vogel marked fifty years since they started the pioneering Australian music tech company. Key early software engineers Michael Hornsby and Andrew Cannon were there too, among other staff. Their creation, the Fairlight CMI Series I from the late seventies, fundamentally shaped modern recording tech, earning a spot in the TECnology Hall of Fame two decades later.
They initially tried building a digital synth, which resulted in the bulky, expensive QASAR M8. Vogel then had the idea to record a piano note and play it back at different pitches, a process they named sampling. This led them to assemble a system with a green screen, a light pen for drawing waveforms, an eight-inch floppy drive, and a keyboard. The resulting Fairlight CMI launched in 1979, quickly grabbing the attention of artists like Peter Gabriel, Stevie Wonder, and Kate Bush, along with producers such as Trevor Horn.
The instrument established the concept of a music workstation, combining a sampler, waveform editor, an eight-track sequencer called Page R, and floppy disk storage. These ideas were widely copied by competitors like the Synclavier, E-mu, and Akai as technology advanced. Features it pioneered, including sampling, sequencing, and digital sound manipulation, are now standard in every modern digital audio workstation.
They initially tried building a digital synth, which resulted in the bulky, expensive QASAR M8. Vogel then had the idea to record a piano note and play it back at different pitches, a process they named sampling. This led them to assemble a system with a green screen, a light pen for drawing waveforms, an eight-inch floppy drive, and a keyboard. The resulting Fairlight CMI launched in 1979, quickly grabbing the attention of artists like Peter Gabriel, Stevie Wonder, and Kate Bush, along with producers such as Trevor Horn.
The instrument established the concept of a music workstation, combining a sampler, waveform editor, an eight-track sequencer called Page R, and floppy disk storage. These ideas were widely copied by competitors like the Synclavier, E-mu, and Akai as technology advanced. Features it pioneered, including sampling, sequencing, and digital sound manipulation, are now standard in every modern digital audio workstation.
