Fairlight Synthesizer

Fairlight co-founder Peter Vogel has put up a teaser about a 30th anniversary limited edition version of the Fairlight CMI, a pioneering polyphonic sampling instrument.

Vogel calls this image a pre-production mockup for the Fairlight CMI Series 30A.

If you’ve got more info or other thoughts on the Fairlight CMI Series 30a, leave a comment below! Read more…

David Vandenborn is blogging his progress restoring a vintage Fairlight synthesizer:

Lately I’ve been busy restoring a Series IIx that had sustained serious damage from a leaked battery. Thanks to Peter Wielk at Horizontal Productions I was able to replace the broken cards. And after some extra debugging, the alphanumeric keyboard wasn’t working, I’m able to start learning and using this dream machine.

While I love vintage analog synths, I find it hard to romanticize old digital synths. You could spend a ton of money to keep a Fairlight running, and it’s always going to be kludgy compared to current computers. 

On the other hand, these were used to make a lot of great music, and used to cost an arm and a leg!