11 Facts About Fairlight CMI

Fairlight CMI is a digital synthesizer, sampler, and digital audio workstation introduced in 1979 by Fairlight.

Fairlight CMI discovered that by playing the recording back at different pitches, it sounded much more realistic than a synthesized piano sound.

Nonetheless, the Fairlight CMI garnered significant attention from Australian distributors and consumers for being able to emulate sounds of acoustic instruments, as well as for its light pen and three-dimensional sound visualisation.

The Fairlight CMI garnered publicity in the science industry, being featured on the BBC science and technology series Tomorrow's World.

The Fairlight CMI was like a much more reliable and versatile digital Mellotron.

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The Fairlight CMI's popularity peaked in 1982 following its appearance on a special of the arts magazine series The South Bank Show that documented the making of Peter Gabriel's fourth self-titled studio album, where he used 64 kilobytes worth of samples of world music instruments and sequenced percussion.

The Fairlight CMI II was a high-level composition tool that not only shaped the sound of the 80s, but the way that music was actually written.

The Fairlight CMI company was becoming more focused on post-production products, a market Paine had a hard time getting used to, and when HHB Communications Ltd took over distribution for the United Kingdom, they failed to sell any.

The first classical album using the Fairlight CMI was produced by Folkways Records in 1980 with composers Barton McLean and Priscilla McLean.

Ubiquity of the Fairlight CMI was such that Phil Collins stated on the sleeve notes of his 1985 album No Jacket Required that "there is no Fairlight CMI on this record" to clarify that he had not used one to synthesize horn and string sounds.

In 2015, the Fairlight CMI was inducted into the National Film and Sound Archive's Sounds of Australia collection.