Right now I shouldn’t be spending any money, especially on worthless shit. But from the mail I’ve been getting I feel that I must honour my promise to take a look at the Fairlight CMI application for the iPad. Your sense of right and wrong, your insane attachment to the 1980s, your need for 5 minutes or less of bile – the power of the cloud compels me. So be it.
Fun fact: Severed Heads did NOT have a Fairlight computer musical instrument at any stage, despite assurances by ‘knowledgeable fans’. We had a CASSETTE of demos made on the Fairlight, which we ran through guitar pedals to make a track called CMID (CMI demonstration tape). What we had for a short while was a Fairlight CVI.
Fun fact 2: Stephen Jones did NOT design the CVI. He designed a machine called the DVS, of which there was one and didn’t work too well. The only reason being he was too poor to buy the parts he needed and so it ran on avocado and moths.
Being one of the very first samplers the CMI was a like a dog that walked on hind legs, never mind how well it did it. It is older than an Amiga. It is older than a Mirage. It is older than an AKAI 612. All of these things sound better than what you get here. Compared to anything you have used this sounds horrible and you’re not going to actually use it for anything so get that out of your mind straight away.
- The samples are lofi, hissy, aliased and shorter than a bad root. And not lofi in the way that the Mirage was, which was actually pretty cool. I mean like the original SoundBlaster. The real machine had a low pass filter, this doesn’t. Fairlight claim that a low pass would use up too much CPU.
- Samples don’t loop by default; you can make them but that sounds like driving two cars at each other.
- Quite a few of the sounds have a click at the front. Usually the delicate ones.
- Anyone who used a real Fairlight dipped it in reverberation. No such luck here.
What you are buying is ‘the CMI experience’, which is like the Ghost Train at Luna Park. It’s a big in joke – seeing as that’s actually the best thing about it I’m not going to give away any of the jokes.
There is absolutely no reason to buy the full version of this app. You are not going to use Page R, it is not as good as PRO16 on the Commodore 64. Put away your wallet.
Apple fans will be pleased to know there is both a cat and fart sample. You’ll be right at home.
Still on the iPad, we should look at the curious case of Morphwiz and Bebot. One has a singing robot and the other has a wizard but they actually sound and look pretty damn similar. I was kind of mystified how this came about until I saw that the Wizard guy demo’ed Bebot a while ago – I guess he liked it.
Then Stewart shows me Thumb Jam, and on the blurb is Mr. Wizard again! “The only problem I have with this app is that I did not make it myself!” Seems like Mr. Wizard has solved that problem. But they’re all different in a way. Bebot is the simplest, Morphwiz is kind of like Bebot Professional. I haven’t tried Thumb Jam but it’s a sample player not a synthesiser.
Thanks all commentators. Reading your words I feel the toylike nature of the pad is mostly a Good Thing.
Today at work I heard that Pro Tools 9 license keys are being snapped off publicly accessible computers, possibly because putting the license for expensive software on a fragile plastic key is like leaving a pie in a window with a sign saying EAT ME. There may be a way that you can put a key on a server, but I can’t help but think the dongle is never going to work for teaching labs. The Kamp is going to add Ableton Live, part of the attraction is the copy protection is not made of plastic. Discussion about upgrading Pro Tools LE to 9 is ‘frank’, I find myself defending it, but this could be Stockholm Syndrome. Others say that Ableton Live is just fine for multitrack. Then there’s Logic which has its own pompom girls, and the Reaper freakers. Does your head in. Everybody has a favourite and no one can slam dunk a solution.
I guess if somebody held a gun at my head we’d all be using Ableton Live, but I do think it costs much too much for the average punter. MAX for Live is also stupidly expensive given that you also need MAX. And all that to get an LFO.
Of course FL Studio is only $99. But then it’s not professional.
These professionals would never use FL Studio because