bitley™ wrote:Friends,
There is no hate on Rack extensions, other refills, Reason users, biscuits, Tasmanian dwarfs, uilleann pipes, Kong users, Donkey Kong players or Jazzmatazz records in this thread, no need for anyone to be offended in any way at all; it was just written in a moment of slight frustration, when feeling that the enormous amount of work with this soundbank still hasn't reached out much to the Reason user base at large.
I was perhaps feeling like, um, someone opening a new McDonalds restaurant only to serve just five customers the first day. That guy would call the marketing division and ask if they'd not published any advertisements. He would go out on the street, perhaps go for a little ride in his McDonalds pickup, to see if the signs were visible at all. As I am not running a McDonalds restaurant, I don't have a marketing department and no large signpoints. I just have a small website out there in the universe, and I am just hoping for some google search results pointing my direction. There is a youtube channel and a little cloud on the soundcloud heaven, but sometimes one just can get the feeling of things not being enough. There have been Facebook advertisements of the simplest form, and they have resulted in a 'Like' or two, but still: Aren't there more Reason users? That's the feeling.
Now, from reading all the good comments in this thread, I've started to realize that perhaps I need to change some of the bits in this puzzle. I have often been thinking that a product info & order page shouldn't have too much text, since that wouldn't be attractive to people not much into the english language; japanese visitors perhaps just plays the demos anyway? Who knows!
Anyway: I am greatful for those who have been understanding me, and I am sorry to hear if anyone felt jumped on in any sort of bad way.
I personally started out with synthesizers in 1985, and I felt like I discovered the world when I bought my first issue of Keyboard Magazine in 1987, first week in highscool in a town named Södertälje, where they sold international magazines. Long before internet and all that. I had been programming sounds on my first synthesizers; Casio CZ-101 and Roland Juno 2. But I thought those sounds were very basic and so on. So I started purchasing sound banks on Atari ST disks or even on paper; manually entering all the values into the Juno 2 from a Livewire soundsheet. Suddenly I realized those sounds weren't too exciting either. So I realized I might need a reverb. Or a delay. And a drum machine. I often tell the tale of how I used to beg and cry for a little cash from my dear parents, then go in to Södertälje by commuter train from Gnesta where I grew up, a 30 minute ride, walk from there to Tälje Musik, a musicstore, and rent a Roland TR-626 over the weekends. Armed with the Juno and the 626 I would record sound-on-sound demos on my dad's old Sony TC-366 reel tape recorder from like 1970 or so. The Sony manual described, painfully theoretical, how one should connect the RCA cables in order for the magical sound-on-sound effect. I rummaged my dad's guitar equipment and found his pink Ibanez AD-9, analog delay pedal, and connected that one to my Juno. My dad saw me and said with surprise: "What in the world are you doing, son?". That's how it all started for me... hehe.
In 1989 I worked an entire summer saving up for my first own computer; an Atari 1040 ST. After that, I realized I needed multitimbral synthesizers and the Yamaha TX81Z became the first one. In 1991 I had begun buying, selling and trading synthesizers like mad using the yellow pages, or Gula Tidningen as it was called in Sweden. Gearlist back then; Kawai K4, TX81Z, Matrix 1000, Yamaha RY30, Roland JX8P, Alesis Midiverb III, Roland M120, Korg DW6000... then finally in 1992 I could afford my first sampler; an Akai S700.
After that - a complete BAZUNGA of instruments, samplers, soundbanks, a journey that's been going on ever since then. The search for the perfect sound. I bought sample CDs, I sampled anything that made a sound; stored it all; samplers like EPS 16 Plus, ASR10, S-1000, S-2000, E-5000, Emulator III, Casio FZ-1, etc etc... sometimes I found Fairlight sounds and just WOWed about how cool they were, instantly recognizing Art Of Noise, Pet Shop Boys, Howard Jones and Yazoo sounds.
Now... to the Fairlight... then...
Fairlight always was that magical, mythical, amazing, utterly expensive, utterly secret machine that only guys like the ones above, A-ha and Kraftwerk had access to. And then one day, in late 2009, a friend I chat with starts mentioning that he had one in his studio and just sold and shipped it to France in a specially made giant wooden box. I go like "Nooooo man How Could You Ever!?"... "CASH" he said... hehe, "but I have recorded all of the sounds, including my own ones, I have them on my computer..."... and I start begging like the worst beggar ever, saying that I really would love love love love building a sound bank based on that. It's actually a rainy night and the time is like 21.00 (9 PM) on a friday night. He says "my kid and my wife are having a cold... they are sleeping already..." and I'm like... I don't care man... I care, but you know, I don't care... can I come over? "Now?!" "Yeah?"... hehe. "OK then but we have to be really quiet and we can't use any speakers"... "Sure bro, no problems"... and then I walk about a mile to reach his flat, rain is pouring down and almost nobody is outside. I get up there and we meet for the first time, two synth nerds sneaking around like thiefs there in his flat, "shhh, be quiet!", "Oh... sorry... damn... dropped my shoe!"... then he shows his Fairlight sample collection and I'm just bewildered by the promise of getting access to all this. Armed with the newly burned DVD with all the samples I literally sing in the rain, and dance the way back home.
Then I know a guy who knows Peter Vogel. Founder of the Fairlight CMI, down in Australia, so we contact him asking if maybe we could do something with these sounds if we treat them carefully, and we send a demo of the first built sounds. He replies in a week; "This is actually a very good idea as it will help spreading the information about the Fairlight. We will do something new here and it will take a while, so I think your soundbank can fill up some spots for us, but I don't own the rights myself any longer so you will have to ask the "other" Fairlight as well." So I write to them as well, the ones making the high end standalone DAW and mixing systems. "Oh, cool", they respond, "...we actually love Reason and use it in our demos sometimes so if we could have the old CMI sounds in there it would be a fun addition... Go ahead!"... and suddenly I have the blessing. I also write to the remainings of E-mu Systems, and they also respond in a super positive way; "Your demo sounds great. Feel free to include those sounds". So then a lot of bases are covered for this project to start.
The first version is released in 2010, and it comes with about 400 patches, but none of the factory presets, just "Fairlight inspired" sounds, so people on Propellerheads' User Forum, including Peff, etc, tells me to please add the Fairlight presets too. Then a google journey starts, and I print out several versions of the PDFs people have made on the Fairlight soundbank, covering about 22 8-inch floppy disks with about 10-15 sounds on each. As I have all samples it's basically a work of looping them, fixing start points, cutting them, etc, and I use various tools but not happy with external loop editors I first feel that looping sounds in the NNXT itself actually is faster, so an extremely tedious process begins; a single violin sound can take up to three hours to loop correctly, tweaking, tweaking, tweaking... working days and nights, endlessly, and after like 2-3 months I am able to release the first update, called Supremacy; an addition to Fairlight CMI Legacy.
Six years later... I am still... extremely enthusiastic about the opportunity I got, and I still build sounds, and I still loop them in Reason, but now I loop the waveforms instead, which is much faster and better. So for WBF R2 I actually "resampled" much of the work, using the new fixed waveforms instead, with included looping points, so that it's easier than ever to build new sounds.
The amazing soundbank I am talking about really, is of course the original Fairlight CMI soundbank. It was amazing for real, because it was assembled at Fairlight in Australia, from manually snail-posted 8-inch disks sent from studios mainly in the UK, some sounds are actually sampled by Peter Gabriel himself for instance. I am guessing the CMI was so extremely expensive, even for guys like him, that contributing to the disk library perhaps gave price reductions or other benefits. One such disk, sent from France, I believe, featured the all time classic Sararr sound, the one you'll hear playing the main melody in Art Of Noise's legendary Moments In Love;
For the one into this for real, the story behind that sound alone is extremely exciting; it is a sample of a singer named Sara, carefully instructed to "sing like a synthesizer", "with lots of air in your timbre".
These sounds were, in 1982 or 1983 high end sounds only for the high end users lucky enough to even have access to a Fairlight. A system that cost like five new Volvo cars back then, or the equivalent of a luxurious mansion. $200,000 back in 1982 is like how much today?
![Wink ;-)](./images/smilies/icon_e_wink.gif)
That, is the Fairlight.
The rest is history? I don't know, it lives on for me, I still love that track and all the other tracks people made with these machines.
And I love becoming a part of the Fairlight history in a way, by renewing it, adding to it, keeping it updated.
That's the moment in love from me...
![Wink ;-)](./images/smilies/icon_e_wink.gif)
I could write a book on this but I would need to do it in my native language...
![Wink ;)](./images/smilies/icon_e_wink.gif)
Sorry for any faults in the english...