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Topic: Mike and Fairlight CMI< Next Oldest | Next Newest >
Tati The Sentinel Offline




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Posted: Mar. 14 2009, 14:16

We all know that this keyboard was part of Mike's music during the 80's, is there anyone here who likes the effect of Fairlight CMI on Mike's work?

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Philippe Tavares Offline




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Posted: Mar. 14 2009, 16:40

:) Surely ! Interesting post Tati ! I had read somewhere , but i don't remember where now , how he did the effect on Foreign affair , this kind of effect with a lot of delay was made with the Fairlight and i really like it ! If someone could help me to find where this paper is , it would be nice ! Tati ? don't forget Mike really likes high technology and during the Eighties the Fairlight was used a lot by other musicians like Peter Gabriel and Kare Bush and many others !

;)
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Dirk Star Offline




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Posted: Mar. 14 2009, 17:07

Yeah I like that little effect on Foreign Affair,it kind of represents waves lapping against the shoreline does`nt it!?I liked the Fairlight back in the day.But it was one of those instruments even when it came out that you realised wasn`t gonna` be around for very long.I particularly liked Mike`s work with it on The Killing Fields,and I agree that both Peter Gabriel & Kate Bush used it with great effect.I remember seeing Gabriel on The South Bank Show around 1981/2,just prior to him releasing his fourth solo album.Going around a scrapyard and smashing up stuff,recording it as "samples" onto the Fairlight etc.You could see he was completely in love with the thing at the time,and I dare say Mike was the same I guess.

Frank Zappa made some quite interesting instrumental stuff with it around 1984/5 as well.Although the thing with Zappa`s stuff was you couldn`t really tell if he was being entirely serious with it or not.If it was released today in fact you would probably be convinced some kind of post modernistic irony was at work.The only thing is Zappa was right there while it was all still going on,whilst other people were still working out how to use it properly I guess.I dare say Frank was aware of that.
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Philippe Tavares Offline




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Posted: Mar. 14 2009, 17:53

;) With my musical tools on my small and humble home studio , i've already tried to reproduce it with a lot of  " delays effects "  but no success !
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larstangmark Offline




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Posted: Mar. 14 2009, 18:30

The sound on Foreign Affair sounds like a sampled bell sound with a glissando on it. At the time glissando was only available on analogue synthesizers, so I guess the effect was unique for the Fairlight.
Listen to Jarre's Magnetic Fields part 1 for similiar effects.


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Tati The Sentinel Offline




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Posted: Mar. 14 2009, 18:41

This video is very interesting,it features Peter Vogel,one of the heads behind Fairlight CMI doing a demonstration on Australian TV in 1980...with a Series I model:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y8BzEILdDw


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ex member 419 Offline




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Posted: Mar. 14 2009, 19:48

Hey tati, i loved the fairlight for the array of effects it was capable of, mike used this technology well and the song foreign affair is an example, deb
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Thea Cochrane Offline




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Posted: April 17 2009, 08:55

I think the delay effect was probably a delay unit of the time - probably one of the early digital delays. The Fairlight CMI is basically a sampler with a built-in sequencer and, although you can see why it was exciting at the time, by today's standards both of them are quite primitive.

You can get freeware samplers now that when paired with a computer-based sequencer will let you do everything a Fairlight could do and probably a lot more besides.
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Scatterplot Offline




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Posted: April 17 2009, 12:17

I always was in the way of thinking that the glassy bell sound sequenced in Foreign Affair was a Yamaha DX7. About a year or 2 after Crises came out, I had access to one at the university I went to. The preset called "Tubular" was it. Identical. I could fool with the portamento and other things and the result was pure Foreign Affair, even with the preset as it was unfooled with it was pure FA. Other than that one cool sound, it seemed FA revolved around an Oberheim DX drum machine, a very clever bass riff which I think was a real bass guitar, not sequenced, some nice string sounds and very nice vocals. For fun, I found videos on sonicstate.com of "the 20 greatest synthesizers".  You might want to check into these videos. My fav. vintage synths were the ARP AXXE and Oberhiem(several models) mostly Oberhiem. Yall have fun, Jim

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Sir Mustapha Offline




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Posted: April 17 2009, 13:21

Quote (Dirk Star @ Mar. 14 2009, 17:07)
I remember seeing Gabriel on The South Bank Show around 1981/2,just prior to him releasing his fourth solo album.Going around a scrapyard and smashing up stuff,recording it as "samples" onto the Fairlight etc.

That's the kind of stuff I'd love to do, personally; but then I look at how utterly mediocre Gabriel's 4th LP is, and I give up the idea. Mark Prindle put it well:

Quote
And all of the tracks feature the elusive, mysterious CMI on such settings as "Petswan," "Piztwang," "Saxy," "Marimba," "Glass," "Blown Drainpipe," "Horn," "Jaw," "Scraped Exhaust Pipe," "Swanee," "Clayt," "Trump," "Scraped Paving Stone" and "Glock." Sound interesting? It sure does! Unfortunately, when you put all these elements together, they sound like a bunch of synthesizers going "bwooooooooooooooo" while a little kid beats rocks together on top of them.


Personally, I think Mike Oldfield did a far better job of using the CMI as a musical instrument instead of as a noise-making toy. Crises has that peculiar airy, vague, windy sound, and yet the music is phenomenally solid; that's oh so much more than Gabriel's Shock-the-Monkey-surrounded-by-yawn album. Sorry, but I just can't stand that album -- not merely for the sound itself, but for his treatment of the "outside" culture as a spooky, haunting, creepy yet exotic and "cute" little alien thing. He became basically the "parody" version of Mike Oldfield and David Byrne.

Sorry for the offtopicness.


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olracUK Offline




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Posted: April 17 2009, 19:14

And no mention yet of the "oh so scary" Killing Fields helicopters?

I just love that effect, but hate the Islands album. Wierd


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Philippe Tavares Offline




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Posted: April 17 2009, 20:26

Quote (Scatterplot @ April 17 2009, 12:17)
I always was in the way of thinking that the glassy bell sound sequenced in Foreign Affair was a Yamaha DX7. About a year or 2 after Crises came out, I had access to one at the university I went to. The preset called "Tubular" was it. Identical. I could fool with the portamento and other things and the result was pure Foreign Affair, even with the preset as it was unfooled with it was pure FA. Other than that one cool sound, it seemed FA revolved around an Oberheim DX drum machine, a very clever bass riff which I think was a real bass guitar, not sequenced, some nice string sounds and very nice vocals. For fun, I found videos on sonicstate.com of "the 20 greatest synthesizers".  You might want to check into these videos. My fav. vintage synths were the ARP AXXE and Oberhiem(several models) mostly Oberhiem. Yall have fun, Jim

:O Really with a DX7 ? This is a pure " eighties " synthé too ! I would like to find again this paper i read about the making of FA effect but i don't remember in which website it was !
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mindphaser Offline




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Posted: May 25 2009, 12:24

Quote
I always was in the way of thinking that the glassy bell sound sequenced in Foreign Affair was a Yamaha DX7.
...
Other than that one cool sound, it seemed FA revolved around an Oberheim DX drum machine, ...


I'm very sure there's no DX7 on Crises and that this 'portamento' sound is from the Fairlight (the vibraphone sample that also appears everywhere on the "Five Miles Out" album). This is confirmed by the track-by-track instrument list on the original album cover - the only keyboard instruments listed there are Fairlight CMI, Oberheim OBXa, Roland Strings (=Vocoder Plus/VP330), Farfisa (=Farfisa Professional Duo organ) and Prophet (=Sequential Circuits Prophet 5). On "Foreign Affair" it's just Fairlight CMI and Roland Strings.

The drumming on "Foreign Affair" is Simon Phillips, not the Oberheim DMX - the drum machine just appears on the title track.  

Cheers! :)


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Scatterplot Offline




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Posted: May 25 2009, 13:48

I am so sorry. But Foreign Affair, one of my fav. MO songs, was a MIDI-based song with the Oberheim DX drum machine covering drums probably used as a MIDI controler to "slave" other instruments except bass(I think the bass was real). Listen very closely. It is so precise, measure for measure all through the song. No human could do that. It was quantized to 16th notes. The "documentation" on these old albums are not always accurate, but listen to parts of 5MO. The same Yamaha DX7 sound, a preset fondly named "Tubular". Named for obviously MO. The DX7 was used so much in early 80's MO albums. It could be that Mike "tweaked" the settings in cooperation with Yamaha to yield the preset on later DX7 models. Either way, it sounded GOOD! Except Mt. Tiedy(sp) which bored me, obvoius use of the DX7 sound. Me and a buddy were doing the same type thing in a studio at the same time(mid 80's). Mike was better!
Jim


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mindphaser Offline




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Posted: May 26 2009, 06:59

Hey Jim!

Quote (Scatterplot @ May 25 2009, 19:48)
It is so precise, measure for measure all through the song. No human could do that.

Oh, a very good drummer surely can (and Simon Phillips is arguably one of the greatest drummers ever :) ).
Foreign Affair cannot be a MIDI-based recording because the Crises album was released in May 1983 and MIDI introduced in August 1983.

BTW, another very good example of Simon Phillips' 'machine drumming' is the EP "Digital Cowboy" by Our Daughter's Wedding (released in 1981) - Phillips is drumming on that one as well and always sounds like a drum machine because he's so absolutely precise... but according to the sleeve notes they didn't even use sequencers!

Quote (Scatterplot @ May 25 2009, 19:48)
but listen to parts of 5MO. The same Yamaha DX7 sound, a preset fondly named "Tubular".

Sorry, this cannot be the DX7, simply because it was not released then. The first DX7 appeared in October 1983, more than 1.5 years after 5MO. Maybe the DX7 had some similar sounds but on 5MO and Crises all the digital stuff is the Fairlight (the track sheet of "Taurus 2" backs that up - Swanee, Lostre, Zither, Whisp etc. were all names of sound files from the Fairlight library). The keyboards used on "Mount Teide" are obviously analogue synthesisers (Oberheim OBXa, Prophet 5,...), the intro was done on an (analogue) vocoder - seems there's nothing digital on that track...

Oooh, synthspotting --- I love that!  :cool:


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Matt Offline




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Posted: May 26 2009, 07:05

Was it the Fairlight (in Mikes hands) that was responsible for the synth bit in the middle of Crises? About 14 mins in if I recall, just before the drum build-up. If so, it certainly has my vote. I LOVE that section of Crises and the synth sound that Mike ended up with!

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mindphaser Offline




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Posted: May 26 2009, 07:48

Matt, I don't have the Crises album at hand at the moment but if you mean the "spacious" part in which just one synth is playing (with massive reverb on it and a guitar coming in later) or the fast sequence before and during the drum build-up: That's not the Fairlight, it's the Oberheim OBXa, a classic analogue synthesiser.

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Matt Offline




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Posted: May 26 2009, 08:12

Quote (mindphaser @ May 26 2009, 12:48)
Matt, I don't have the Crises album at hand at the moment but if you mean the "spacious" part in which just one synth is playing (with massive reverb on it and a guitar coming in later) or the fast sequence before and during the drum build-up: That's not the Fairlight, it's the Oberheim OBXa, a classic analogue synthesiser.

Thanks for that. It the fast part before/during the drum buildup I was thinking of so presumably the OBXa rather than the Fairlight. Fantastic stuff whatever machine he used :)


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The Caveman Offline




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Posted: June 02 2009, 08:37

Bit of an old topic now but still cool.As i understood it Mike got a new Fairlight as they were produced (Series 1,2 and 3).I know he had one for FMO (you can see it on the photo taken in the studio inside thhe gatefold on the original vinyl edition)and you can hear the Foriegn Affair type effect,or variations thereof,all over it has been pointed out,particuarly on Oribidoo.
 So we know he used it on FMO,Crises(the synth and Fairlight sounds on this album i love to bits and have done since the very first time i heard it on  20/01/84  (my 9th birthday)on my sister's mk1 Sony Walkman.Dad used to tape my new LPs when i was a small boy as he didn't trust me to use the record player and i can still remember telling my sister to "shut up-I'm trying to listen" and being amazed by the sound),Discovery,Killing Fields,Isalnds and EM.
 My question is when did he stop using it?Presumabley by the time he'd gotten to Amarok it had become a bit out moded.
Oh and Mike did have a DX7 but swapped it for one of the organs he needed to do TBII at at school for handicapped kids in 91 or 92.


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Thea Cochrane Offline




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Posted: June 13 2009, 22:24

I think Mike copied his Fairlight samples into some other format around the time of Tubular Bells 2 - certainly specific Fairlight sounds are mentioned on the band score and were probably played back from an Akai sampler as they were slightly more reliable than the Fairlight for live use. It's possible that Mike still has the sounds for some virtual sampler, and there were a couple of commercial virtual instruments and sample libraries which contained a lot of the famous Fairlight sounds.
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