Owner Of A Lonely Waveform...
From the original Analog Industries archive. Some links and images from that era no longer resolve.
Some kind soul put up the entire factory sample set from the Fairlight IIx here in a VSE forum topic. Naturally, all the whiny little girls were like “wtf with the looping? ZOMG this shit is thin! Where are my soundfonts?” I guess they were expecting an 8-bit/35kHz sampler with 64K of RAM to sound… uh… “phat” or something?
Anyhow, yes, I know that the IIx is post-90215, so you don’t need to point it out. And just to prove I don’t hold a grudge, I’m busily turning all those WAV files in to Kontakt 3 patches, which I’ll put up here. (There’s a lot of them, so don’t expect this any time in the next couple hours or anything.) I’m even leaving the IIx looping (most of these sounds are actually from the II, of course) intact as much as I can, which adds a certain something. Most modern soft-samplers will load Kontakt 3 files, so you should be in good shape no matter what you own.
As an aside, no offense to the fellow that made the samples, but now that I’m knee-deep in this shit, they’re not terribly good. I wish I was in Chicago where I could get my paws on a IIx with this Mytek and capture some mojo in addition to the sound.
EDIT: Seems those samples were lifted from a commercial sample disk. Selling a commercial sample disk full of samples of samples from a sampler is a piece of fractal irony I don’t want any part of, but be that as it may, I’ve removed the link.
10 comments
@CR- any favorite users of the Fairlight II?
There's a guy in Chicago that bought a II new back in the day, and rented it out to all comers. That Fairlight appears on a shit ton of great records, and (despite various interweb punditry to the contrary) was the one used for Twitch and LORAH. (Al didn't buy the one that was auctioned off until after LORAH was complete.) It is owned by a fellow named, obviously, Frankie Fairlight. I've offered to buy it off him not less than a dozen times but he always just laughed. It is, to the best of my knowledge, his coffee table now.
Anyhow, Frankie Fairlight is my favorite user of the Fairlight II.
-CR
When I think Fairlight I always think of the Art of Noise's first album. And Owner of a Lonely Heart by Yes.
+1 Chris. Thanks for doing this.
+1 from me too! Jarre here I come...
Thanks...
Those comments in the Vintagesynth forum are all worth a good laugh, actually a must read for everybody even remotely experienced. Like, OMG LOL, whatever. Have we really come that far, using presets and trusting someone else doing the hard work? Having someone else chewing your food for you? Yuck.
Anyway, I downloaded the whole shebang and am also doing Kontakt stuff, experimenting and reliving my youth. The strings are teh shit, all bad and aliasing, just good. If we only had a plug-in version of Fairlight's D/A converter... Chris? :-D
Now, if someone could dig up the Peter Gabriel Fairlight library - that would be too cool. Who's to bribe?
If there was an "edit your own comment" button, I'd press it and add "this has nothing to do with people here, but..." right before "Have we really come..." in the first chapter. :-)
Eh. I'll get me coat.
There is a vid floating around on youtube of Herbie Hancock on this instrument...awesome vid.
I've always found it odd that no company has put out a set of the Fairlight samples, save those that licensed the Hollow Sun samples, which is like only 4 or 5 different sounds IIRC. Something like MTronPro, or an extensive commercial Kontakt library.
Thanks for pointing this out. I downloaded all of them while I was finishing my taxes... so poor last year, I basically just paid Self-Employment Tax (not really an oxymoron, but makes chuckle and weep) - picking up a little this year, though. Anyway, these will go in with the many gigabytes of samples I have and don't use, but they will probably be the most fun not to use.
- Barry
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