From: "tspeer" <
tspeer@...>
> Off topic part:
> Australia - "THE FAIRLIGHT"!!!!!!!!
>
> [...]
>
> I agree--Can't beat THE coolest Sampler of all time.
In this respect, it's interesting to read what Paul Wiffen, of the British
Sound On Sound magazine, had to say about the Fairlight:
"The Fairlight, inspiration from afar to a generation of electronic
musicians, was, once you got one in front of you, a load of old tosh, the
electronic equivalent of a kazoo, with all the musicality of a vacuum
cleaner. Whatever sound you put in, you got the same nasal honk out, and
trying to use it like a normal keyboard was the most frustrating thing I
ever did. I thought so the first time I heard/played one and nothing has
happened since to change my mind (I am of course referring to the pre-Series
III machines; the engineers at Fairlight would have been fools and
charlatans indeed if they couldn't have made the Series III sound decent and
play well after all the progress that had been made by other companies by
the time that machine came out...). I am referring to the pile of junk
marketed between 1979 and 1985. And when I say "the first time I heard one",
I mean really heard one, on its own, not buried in a production with all the
craft of experienced engineers and producers disguising its nasal honk. I
still vivedly remember Ken McAlpine, a former colleague of SOS Publisher Ian
gilby and myself at Electronics & Music Maker, sneaking me into the demo
room at Syca in 1983 to hear a Fairlight naked for the first time. I was
horriefied. Everything sounded like it was coming through a fuzzbox, and a
very cheap and nasty fuzzbox at that! I came away from that evening with a
profound sense of loss that the supposed greatest electronic musical
instrument was such a turkey (though it increased my admiration for all the
musicians and engineers who managed to make it sound so good on their
records). And sharing a booth with the original Emulator at a Parisshow a
few weeks later, where the demonstrator did mothing more than play the
Marseillaise on an out-of-tune trumpet over a maximum of two octaves, did
little to resurrect my faith in sampling."
Hey, he said it, not I. :)
Interesting to note, however, is that one friend of mine prefers the JP8000
sound over the AN1x, while the other one (who happens to have a shitload of
'real' analogue synths) is of the opposite opinion.
- Peter