Fairlight CMI Series I

The Fairlight CMI Series I was the first commercially available sampler/workstation synthesizer, introduced in 1979.

Peter Gabriel was one of the earliest adopters of the Fairlight, and had the distinction of being the first Fairlight owner in the UK. He heard of the machine through synth player Larry Fast. He borrowed a demonstration model during the making of the Peter Gabriel 3 album (a.k.a. Melt). Peter Vogel - co-inventor of the Fairlight - visited Gabriel's Ashcombe House in Bath in the Summer of 1979 and demonstrated the machine to him, Stephen Paine (Gabriel's cousin) and others involved on Melt, and they (Peter included) were impressed with the CMI and its ability to store recorded sounds as solid-state sounds and play back sounds at different pitches. In Stephen Paine's words, it was like a "much more reliable and versatile digital Mellotron". Gabriel borrowed a demonstration model of the Fairlight to use on Melt for a few of the sampled sounds and grew to like the machine that he eventually bought one himself.

Peter Gabriel co-founded the company Syco Systems with Paine as a UK importer and distributor of the Fairlight, and helped build up a long list of clients for the Fairlight company, such as John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin), Kate Bush, Thomas Dolby, Rick Wright and several others.

The one album that helped popularise the Fairlight and explored it to great effect was Peter Gabriel's fourth album released in 1982 (a.k.a. Security). On which Peter sampled a variety of sounds for use as textures and effects, and developed tracks like "Rhythm Of The Heat" (which was built around a looped Fairlight sample). He is shown demonstrating the Fairlight on the South Bank Show Documentary on making the fourth album, which helped boost the Fairlight's popularity. Also, according to producer David Lord, they sampled some of the sounds into the Fairlight at Crescent Studios, which became part of the standard Fairlight library. Larry Fast also took the Fairlight CMI on the Playtime 88 tour to use the sampled sounds.

Peter, like many, felt the Fairlight was good for a variety of effects, but it proved to be poor in terms of being an "orchestra-in-the-box". He eventually upgraded to the Series IIx which housed the Page R sequencer.

Quotes on the Fairlight
Peter Vogel on how the Fairlight got to Peter Gabriel: "'I think the first stop was in LA—it might have even been a Stevie Wonder session, when he was recording Journey Through ‘The Secret Life of Plants’ He immediately latched on to it: “we can put nature sounds in here that will work really well with this concept.” From there we went all over the place, but the next major connection was that someone knew Larry Fast, who was working for Peter Gabriel. He was Gabriel’s synthesizer player and he was recording in New York at the time, and they said “can you come up to New York and we’ll have a look at it”. So we went up to New York and he looked at it and then he rang someone else at another studio and that’s how it went. And then I delivered the first machine to Peter Gabriel in the UK.' "

Peter Gabriel on the Fairlight CMI Series I: "'Yeah, it is amazing. It's something I've dreamt of for a very long time. I never thought I'd actually get my hands on one. It generates sound internally, which I never use at all, or you can get external sounds fed into it. So you can take just one note, like a tap on this paper cup (taps a cup) and the computer will then show it on a TV screen, in its wave form. Then you can manipulate that and then send it back out of the computer to a keyboard. You can then play a tune on the tapped plastic cups. The options are amazing. There are two or three other machines now that do that. They're now the price of a small house, but when the Japanese get to them and they become add -ons to the home computer, they'll be as common as pianos.' (Recording & Music'', June 1983)"