Way Beyond Fairlight X: A New Creative Angle
Way Beyond Fairlight X brings an entirely fresh, limitless creative perspective to timeless sounds. A new wave of inspiring Fairlight CMI based content like you have never heard it before. Just how cool?
Will it come with bread and butter sounds?
We all love presets and that is all cool so yes, these are sounds you can easily use in any style of music, however, the focus lies more on hunting for really Xtreme sounds stretching out to the borders of what can be done. In music, however, that sentiment is both a possible truth at times and a comedy at times, as even Beatles stuff from 1969 can sound more fresh than anything depending on your mood and your hearing fatigue. Sound libraries needs extreme variation to, quite simply, be fun to make and fun to use.
Way Beyond Fairlight X is still being developed so if you join in early you will share the joy of seeing it grow on a near day to day basis. No worries though: it’s already very fun, fat and cool, slowly and safely becoming just as great as you can expect – no matter if you’re a previous Bitley fan or new to all of this.
Demo version: The new delight refill
Way Beyond Fairlight X. For Reason 11 and up.
Special introduction offer $69 USD.
Fairlight CMI in sh-sh-sh-short
The Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument, introduced in 1979, was the first keyboard based digital sampling product ever made and costing as much as a family house, it was truly out of reach for most musicians and so it quickly got a magical buzz which never really faded as many artists and producers also helped greatly in creating its legendary status by using it on evergreen and true hit records; Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Art Of Noise, Mike Oldfield, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Yes, Jean-Michel Jarre, Pet Shop Boys and the list goes on.
Other great manufacturers of synthesizer instruments suddenly saw the impact and quickly followed pursuit. Soon thereafter, the world saw amazing sampling based machines made by E-mu Systems, Synclavier, Linn, Oberheim, Ensoniq, Sequential Circuits, Kurzweil, Yamaha, Korg, Roland / Boss and Akai – spawning even more great records with sampling content created by people like Depeche Mode, Janet and Michael Jackson, Jaki Graham, Kraftwerk, Fleetwood Mac, Enigma, Chak-Chak-Chaka Khan, yes the sound of sampling on records had truly been born. In the time window of say 1980 to 1985 up until 1990, with a bit of time stretch, a very special sampled sound was often heard, where the challenge was low bit rates, 15 to 30 kHz of digital recording frequencies, heavily looped and not so strikingly real pianos, strings and what not.
Enter the 90’s and digital recording and computer memory quickly got way much cheaper and bigger, and so, the art of real sampling in pop music sort of got lost in the process as sampling even had reached the home computing scene, mainly with the Amiga. Even the coveted and expensive hardware samplers quickly faded into oblivion, or got built into the next generation synthesizers like Roland D-50, Korg M1 and Wavestation. Workstation machines with sampling then finally came with the Triton, the Fantom-S and the Motif.
Saved by the sound of electronic
House, techno and Hip hop music came in as true rescuers of the art, forever trademarking the sam-sam-sam-sampling coolness, still keeping it (un)real today by using small dirty old loops, snippets of lost and found drums, strings sounding not quite orchestral etc. As that sound also was prominent in early synth pop we kind of longed back to those days and began remixing and producing records by actually removing multisamples and destroying perfect loops, stretching out human voices to sound like sampling again; finally reaching a point where we said we can do this, contacting the original sampling inventors and asking if we could please use their stuff? After providing sound demos we got all thumbs up and the work on our libraries began. Reason had gotten quite real sounding with Orkester and the Korg Oasys got gigabyte sampling so it was time to “rememberememberebmemer” our Ensoniq days for real again and take back the artful uglyness & synthethic beauty of a single Xylophone or Orchestra hit streched across the keyboard.
We are like an unofficial part of the Fairlight CMI, next chapter, building on true love and respect.
Not only developing our own sound libraries, we also created patches and samples for Arturia’s CMI-V and we also took some interest in installing the Quasar Beach project. Quickly seeing and realising that while extremely cool, those projects are perfectly usable side by side with what we do and we have a completely unique view on all of it. See, we didn’t really focus on the Fairlight CMI, after all. We focused on what people did with the Fairlight, using complete, high-end studios, filled with other digital and analog synthesizers, drum machines and effects.
That was how our previous extremely large project Way Beyond Fairlight R2 came about and became real. “It must contain just about everything from the best studios of the past, it must be as capable as one of those studios were” was our leading starlight when doing that.
Our banks provide the successful marriage of vintage meeting tomorrow and they have also been used by real world original Fairlight CMI legends like Tears For Fears and Scritti Politti, which is like the ultimate testament of telling us we did something with true meaning and purpose. But we’re just as happy hearing about You and what you’re doing with the sounds!