Mondo Knows Facts
The Fairlight CMI was the first digital sampler
The Australian workstation arrived in 1979 and cost as much as a house The Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument recorded sounds into digital memory and played them from a keyboard, with a light pen for drawing on the waveform display. It cost tens of thousands of pounds and was used by Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush and Art of Noise. Later models added sequencing. It sits in Mondo's music collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
Where this comes from
Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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More facts like this
CD audio samples 44,100 times a secondThe rate came from fitting film and television equipment rather than hearingThe E-mu Emulator brought sampling into reachThe 1981 machine stored its sampled sounds on ordinary floppy disksThe Akai MPC60 combined pads, sampler and sequencerRoger Linn designed the 1988 machine around his velocity-sensitive padsThe Amen break became the most sampled loopA six-second drum solo recorded in 1969 underpins thousands of tracksClyde Stubblefield's Funky Drummer beat is everywhereThe 1969 James Brown session produced one of the most reused groovesA 1991 court ruling changed sampling overnightGrand Upright against Warner made an uncleared loop straightforward infringement
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Tags: sampling, fairlight, digital
The Fairlight CMI was the first digital sampler: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- The Australian workstation arrived in 1979 and cost as much as a house. The figure is taken from Sound on Sound, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a music fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Music shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.