The sound that connects Stravinsky to Bruno Mars - 07/30/18 09:59 PM
Re: The sound that connects Stravinsky to Bruno Mars - 07/31/18 12:35 AM
Back in the day, I remember digging through music magazines trying to find out what I could about the Fairlight, mainly because of the connection to Alan Parsons. I eventually figured out that the instrument I really wanted was a Mellotron. 
Some time later, I thought it might be interesting to try to clone the Fairlight's Page R in DOS. I ended up writing to Greg Holmes, trying to get details of how the Page R actually worked. I'd seen some mockups of the screen, but couldn't really suss out the details of how to enter pitch information.
He also said the magic of the Fairlight came from the special way that it distorted the samples, and I wouldn't be able to duplicate that simply by stretching the samples. I didn't really want to capture that particular "magic" of the Fairlight, but it turned out that to do melodic stuff it needed a keyboard controller, which I didn't have at the time.
He gave me a number of other reasons for not following through with the idea, one of the most compelling being that I probably didn't want to be sued.
Sadly, my assembly skills weren't up to getting the realtime playback working, so it was sort of moot anyway.
Fortunately, I got my hands on the Impulse Tracker, which was basically a poor student's Fairlight, and wasted hours searching for samples on the Internet (mostly for orchestral instruments), and occasionally writing short tunes.
Eventually I was able to get enough money for Garritan Personal Orchestra, and had to face the fact that what was holding up creating my musical masterpiece wasn't the lack of a good solo violin sample, but lack of interesting musical ideas.
Good times.
Some time later, I thought it might be interesting to try to clone the Fairlight's Page R in DOS. I ended up writing to Greg Holmes, trying to get details of how the Page R actually worked. I'd seen some mockups of the screen, but couldn't really suss out the details of how to enter pitch information.
He also said the magic of the Fairlight came from the special way that it distorted the samples, and I wouldn't be able to duplicate that simply by stretching the samples. I didn't really want to capture that particular "magic" of the Fairlight, but it turned out that to do melodic stuff it needed a keyboard controller, which I didn't have at the time.
He gave me a number of other reasons for not following through with the idea, one of the most compelling being that I probably didn't want to be sued.
Sadly, my assembly skills weren't up to getting the realtime playback working, so it was sort of moot anyway.
Fortunately, I got my hands on the Impulse Tracker, which was basically a poor student's Fairlight, and wasted hours searching for samples on the Internet (mostly for orchestral instruments), and occasionally writing short tunes.
Eventually I was able to get enough money for Garritan Personal Orchestra, and had to face the fact that what was holding up creating my musical masterpiece wasn't the lack of a good solo violin sample, but lack of interesting musical ideas.
Good times.