itch.io

I realise now it's mentioned in part four of "The Fairlight Explained" by Jim Grant, from back in 1984:

https://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/the-fairlight-explained/7947

The article points out that the London College of Furniture owned a Fairlight CMI - Jim Grant was a senior lecturer there - which is something I would never have guessed. They apparently had a well-equipped music technology school on account of the historical links between piano-making and musicians. Sound on Sound has a photo of the very same Fairlight in 1989. I wonder what happened to it?

Alas the London College of Furniture doesn't exist any more. It seems to have been absorbed by the London Metropolitan Museum.

As an edit to the above the "damping" control on Page 7 adds a release tail - it works well with a value of 20 and the damping loop turned off. The help files don't seem to mention it so perhaps it was a late addition.

This is great. I was surprised that it works on my Mac, which is a 2012 Mac Mini running a patched copy of Big Sur - it crashes with Big Sur 11.6.2 (something about a graphics problem) but works fine with 11.6.8.

My question - I know you can do envelopes with the function page, but is there an equivalent of the Release step in an ADSR envelope? The Fairlight seems to stop sounds the moment you release a key, which makes a click noise. Is there a way to have a smooth key release?