David Vorhaus - That Fairlight Sound !

Rob Puricelli: Hello and welcome to the Sound On Sound podcast channel about Electronic Music and all things synth. I'm Rob Puricelli and in this episode I talk to David Vorhaus of White Noise fame about his involvement with the Fairlight CMI during its early days, as well as the story behind his Kaleidophon ribbon controller invention and a very early sequencer called Maniac. Hi, it's Rob Puricelli here and I'm very fortunate to be in the studio that belongs to David Vorhaus here in North London. Thanks for having us. David Vorhaus: More than welcome. Rob: Thank-you. I want to ask you, because of my particular selfish interest in the Fairlight, just a few things about those early days and the first of my questions is, how did you first come across the Fairlight CMI and of course, Peter Vogel? David: Well, it must have been about 1979, 1980. I was asked to appear in the finals of the Electronic Musical Instrument Competition in Linz, in Austria. They had this big international competition for the best electronic instrument, so I thought, sounds fun, went along to this thing and that's where I met Peter. We both ended up with a prize, me for the Kaleidophon, Peter for the Fairlight. But more to the point, we just became best friends. In fact Peter came up to me and said hey, we have a girlfriend in common. My girlfriend who in London, this Australian girl, was now his girlfriend in Australia. And it took off from there. Rob: I see. So that, that was when you first met Peter Vogel, that was your first experience of a Fairlight CMI? David: It was also the first time I'd ever seen the CMI. Rob: So what happened next? David: Yes, in fact we used to call it the CMI because it was the only computer music instrument in the world. Rob: So David, the Fairlight that you have here in the studio, which is kind of tucked away in the corner there and you've got the VDU in another corner of the room, if I'm not mistaken that's the first Fairlight that came into the UK that you acquired through Peter Gabriel and the early Syco Systems. David: That's right, yes, this is the first one that ever left Australia. Yes, Peter Gabriel had this for a few weeks before me. I got it from him, he got another one, brand spanking new one. A white one. Rob: Yes, because yours is painted black, yeah? David: Yes. It was actually cream colour. Rob: Yes, that's right. Hospital beige. David: Yes, yes, yes. And they just decided, actually now they're going to paint them white. Which fortunately meant that I could get it at factory cost to favour from Peter, as we were kind of best friends at that point. Rob: Sure. David: Saved me 15,000 quid. They weren't cheap toys. Rob: No, quite. David: I was about to buy a house when I met Peter and decided a Fairlight was more important. Rob: It's a common tale I've come across, yeah. David: And got that instead and used the Fairlight to make a few albums, which paid for a new house so, it was a lot easier in those days, I think, to earn a living as a musician. Rob: So another question I want to ask you and this is something that I've heard from Peter Vogel himself, was about the origin of the famous Orch5 or Orch2 stab, depending on which side of the line you fall on. So, that was sampled from a recording of Stravinsky's Firebird Suite. Now, we had a conversation about Firebird and how that relates to White Noise and the track that's on the album and it got me thinking. So Peter Vogel told me that he was demonstrating or showing you this CMI and he at random pulled this record out of a box and sampled it as a demonstration to you and that's how the sound originated but I wanted to know, was that pure coincidence that he chose that record given your history with Stravinsky on the White Noise album? What's your version of that story? David: Okay no, Peter's got that wrong actually, I'm sorry and he actually, he got the name wrong because he sent that to me a few years ago saying which one is Orch5 and I think it was Orch3 that he had as Orch5 but, you know, you can't forget it, clearly what it is. But it's only mine, everybody attributes me to that and it's by the way the most, I found out on Radio Soho that they're interviewing me, that that's the most sampled sample of all times, even more than anything James Brown has done, who's known for being sampled. But it's only mine in the sense that I found it in Peter Vogel's record collection. He actually wasn't even there, he was at Fairlight and I was waking up late, staying at his house, hung around in his living room for a while before coming over. Just wanted to see how the sampling system worked. So I just, I took out that record and I found the particular sample and I put it on his Fairlight and I sampled his record on his Fairlight. So in that sense, it's mine, but it wasn't mine, or a piece of that matter, it was Stravinsky. Rob: Yeah, of course. So, did you pick that record out of his collection because of your love of Stravinsky's Firebird Suite? David: Yes. Rob: OK and then, because the other thing is I've researched that sound and I've listened to multiple recordings of it, but it's that particular recording by the Philharmonia Orchestra that is the one that you hear. David: Which Philharmonia? Rob: The one here in the UK. David: Was that... Rob: Yeah, the album is... David: London Philharmonia? Rob: Yeah and it's on EMI Classics for Pleasure, which is a division of Music for Pleasure, their EMI label. And I managed to find an actual copy of that record. David: Well done! Rob: Which is, yeah, and it only coast me a few quid, which was quite nice. But I then was able to sample that into a Fairlight that I have and it was just like I was having that moment that you had clearly, 40 years previously which is quite amazing. David: But you probably sampled it in 16 bit. Rob: No, this was on a Series II, so it was in 8 bit, yeah. David: I'd love to get that again and do it properly in 16 bit. Rob: Well, there are 16 bit versions floating around, I'm sure. David: Are there? Rob: Yeah, I'm sure there are, must be. So, you've experienced this Fairlight in Linz, you've gone to, to Australia, you've had that experience there. You then go on to pretty much exclusively work with the Fairlight on the KPM albums. How was that as an experience, just using this one instrument? Was that born out of the creative restrictions of just using one instrument, allowing you to then really push...? David: Yeah, you pretty well hit the nail on the head. You really have to learn how to use a computer, particularly in those days, when they were very computer like. Then so much more user friendly, not just in the way your, you know, your fingers work and everything, but on the kind of sound you can get out of it. They kind of smoothed the edges down, they weren't in those days, it's a bit like a VCS3, it's so unmusical and I, I thought I've really got to just force myself to stick to this and see what I can do with this instrument rather than just, otherwise you'd end up doing everything on everything else and just, and so I had a year to do an album and I would say the first nine months was probably spent on how not to use a computer in an album. So many things are so disappointing but you do find how it can, in fact, be very rewarding and I'm really pleased with the results of that album. Rob: Yes. David: Was that Sound Conjurer, I think? Rob: There's Sound Conjure and Sleight of Hand, sorry, Sleight of Mind. David: Sleight of Mind, yeah I forget which was the, it was the second thing I did for them, after Vorhaus Sound Experiments and it was all Fairlight, nothing but a Fairlight. Rob: So one of the things that has always interested me, but you know, your association with Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson in that realm of the Radiophonic Workshop and that use of what was effectively primitive early sampling of using tape and then messing around with it. You then obviously progressed to the Fairlight and did you see that as an extension of that work and to follow on from that, what did Delia Derbyshire think, or did she ever experience the Fairlight and see it as this new way of doing what she'd done in the past, or was it, because you, I've heard you say that she had a, pretty much a big dislike of synthesisers, so how did that... ? David: I'm afraid she didn't, she wasn't around then by the time I got the Fairlight. Delia was so good at making her own sounds just out of natural everyday things and doing stuff with them, she'd become the master of that but she was disappointed with the first VCS3, which is the first electronic musical instrument almost in the world actually, Bob Moog made the very first, but this was the first in Europe and you, one had to put up with this period of disappointment in what you would like it to do but it doesn't, because when you've already been making electronic music for a while and you know what you want and you know how to get things, you find the disappointment in that you can't get things the old way and I don't think she ever really got over that sadly. She came around in fact some years after and I remember giving her a MIDI device, I think it was something like yes, a Roland D110, which is a simple 8 channels of MIDI and it's a perfect thing to kind of learn MIDI on and make a MIDI arrangement and it doesn't replace great sounds, some of the sounds are alright and as non featured sounds they work fine. But you still want to be able to do your unique things separately, but you do have to learn MIDI, which is a brilliant system and I still use it, the Kaleidophon as a control system, not to be confused with General MIDI, which is an abomination and nothing to do with it, right. But unfortunately she never kind of made that effort to drop her old ways and learn the new ways and then reapply, you know, once you've learnt something new, you can still use... Rob: Because I've seen and read interviews with other members of the Radiophonic Workshop when they got the Fairlight and there was a kind of an epiphany moment where they realised this was a far easier way of creating some of the stuff they'd been using, tape loops and splicing and they took to that, but clearly that wasn't a view shared by all. David: No, even tape loops, you know, could make a tape loop theoretically, 90 minutes long. Yes. 1. 7 seconds or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. I don't even know how 1. 7... I would sample at 14k. Yeah. Which is, on today's standards, ridiculously low. It means 6k is about as high as you can hear. With my old ears, it's about as high as they go anyway. But, um... And that was just over a second. So they must have been sampling at about 10k or less. Yeah. It's really short. And so, yes, these things are limitations you have to put up. They're very good, though, for doing other things. They're brilliant. Well, you know, that's why I feel particularly pleased with that second KPM album I did. Because I think there's some... really good tracks on it. It still gets used a real lot and that was all done with the Fairlight. And, you know, you find the good things eventually. Right. When you find how many things you can't do and it's the same with just about anything, VCS3 was certainly like that and any new thing, like in the 80s we were getting one instrument after another, all these new things coming along and they'd all do amazing new things but I found a real disappointment in practically anything because the other things, they'd always get something wrong and you'd feel, why the hell didn't they do this a sensible way, which stops you using it. So you end up needing about 16 instruments to just do a piece of music that you should be able to do all as one. Rob: So once the Fairlight became, or started to drift out of your workflow, so to speak, where did your journey with sampling then go? Did you progress on to things like Akai samplers or Emu samplers or did you avoid sampling completely? What was your journey through sampling beyond the Fairlight? David: God, I have to look at my rack to see. Okay, after the Fairlight it was Prophet 2000, which is a nice example 2002 plus Sequential Circuits and that would just do anything in Fairlight. Well, not anything because the Fairlight did many other things as well, it wasn't intended particularly for sampling. But this is a much better sampler and works with MIDI, which the Fairlight didn't do and MIDI was really useful because you could integrate that with all sorts of other things. Have your master score on one computer, talking to as many different instruments as you like and this was the sampler, 12 bit. And like the Fairlight, which took enormous trouble to get as clean as possible with 8 bits. But 8 bits still is just not quite there. 12 bits! I thought it was brilliant. It really sounded like the real thing. In fact, this 12 bit sample is far better than a lot of 16 bit machines that came along that didn't really use all the bits properly and had much too much noise. I think the theoretical highest you can get in the way of signal to noise with 12 bits is 72dB, signal to noise, and this gets 68, which is almost perfection, whereas most things would get 50 if you're lucky. Rob: And it adds a little character, doesn't it, as well? I had a similar conversation with other people in the past, where they've said that 16 bit is just too nice, that 14 or 12 gets you close enough, but still maintains a degree of character to the, you know, sonic colouration maybe, to the sound. David: I'd rather put in my own character than have it forced upon you, where you usually don't want the particular character but you know, you can do bit crunching if you need to after. But that was lovely and actually what's interesting is that always it takes a while for the media to catch up and when I had a Fairlight, nobody heard of it and didn't know what it was and it never really paid for itself. By the time I had Prophet and MIDI I was starting to get a lot of really well paid work but it was because I had a Fairlight that they knew me. Oh, he's got a Fairlight, he can do this and so I was getting jobs which in fact the Fairlight couldn't do and I could do with a Prophet and MIDI and people all thought were wonderful, but thought it's because I've got a Fairlight. There's almost like a plaque on the wall to say, you know, you're, you own the Fairlight, therefore you must know what you're doing, you must be of a certain degree of quality. David: Yes, yes. Rob: In fact you were using other technology. David: That's right. Yeah. And it was because I had a Fairlight. In fact it was at this point, it was paying for itself about every three months, it was covering the cost of a Fairlight, raking it in then, but not using the Fairlight. Rob: You've been showing me earlier today your Reaktor setup and the Kaleidophon. Could you just, for the uninformed, could you just kind of tell us what a Kaleidophon is and what it does? David: Well, I guess it started out as a double bass, which is what I used to play. It's got four strings and two and fourths apart, originally, once upon a time. It's developed beyond my wildest dreams but it started, I guess, about the time the VCS3 came out and that is something everybody wanted to play tunes on it and they came out with a keyboard for it and a keyboard is the worst abomination that you could possibly put on a synthesiser like the VCS3, it will only play, you know, semitones apart, it can't bend things and swirl things and stuff and with the strings, with a string instrument, you can vibrato and glide and bend and do all sorts of things which make it interesting. Plus, VCS3s wouldn't stay in tune with a keyboard. I could gradually drift my hand the way the VCS3 was drifting and keep it in tune. So originally that's how it started. Kaleidophon eventually evolved into a MIDI controller which could talk to anything and now it exclusively goes into Maniac, which is a combination of many different instruments built all in with Reaktor, Native Instruments Reaktor. Is this godsend to people that want to make their own instruments because they're not satisfied with anything that exists, so you literally can build your dreams and go far beyond. It has lead lines, bass lines, harmony, many different kinds of samplers and they're all controlled just by your fingers under the Kaleidophon. Rob: So, the Maniac that you have built in Reaktor is based on the original Maniac, which is this hardware analogue sequencer that sits by our feet here as we speak. So what did that do and how has the software expanded its capabilities? David: Well that, which of course was long before Reaktor was born, hardware device, came immediately after Bob Moog actually invented the very first sequencer which you probably know from Donna Summer's record, I Feel Love. That's the sequencer, Bob Moog sequencer and I thought, beautiful idea but wouldn't it be great if you could actually have multiple sequencers that lock together and in fact one set of Bob Moog sequencers cost 16,000, so half a dozen locked together, we're talking ridiculous money. But Johnny Sheriff, a good friend of mine, brilliant designer and great drummer and I were talking about how we would make a sequencer, or a multiple sequencer and after several months of design in our heads we thought, let's go ahead and do it. We had CMOS chips and it should be possible. So we embarked on this piece of hardware which would do the same as about half a dozen Moog sequencers but actually locked together so they could add and subtract from each other, all voltage controlled, all analogue but will also control MIDI things, many different instruments at the same time and this is, I guess, the beginning of sequencing, this is how it all started and this is the very first Maniac. Actually, it's not quite the first maniac. Right. Because MANIAC, which by the way stands for Multiphasic Analog Interactive Chromatophonic Sequencer, MANIAC Sequencer. But the first time the word MANIAC was used was in 1943 or 44 in Los Alamos, America. And it was a very secret. super powerful computer, the first big computer ever made, just to make one calculation. That was to find the critical mass of uranium 235. To find out how much uranium you needed to make an atom bomb. So in terms of your work now, um, What, what do you think of sampling nowadays? Because there is a, a, a huge marketplace for pres sampled orchestras and guitars and drums and so on and so forth. Very little original sampling going on. What, what's your, your take on on the sampling in the, I like to use everything as I say, this thing then went to the, uh, a Sr. Yeah. Um, the e p s mm-hmm. and. I just got to getting this at Supernova, um, Novation, when I discovered Reactor. Right. And Reactor was an epitome for me. Mm hmm. Because instead of this feeling when you get something new and thinking, Okay, it does what it says, but... Why don't they fix it properly? I could make my own stuff and do what I want with it and with Reaktor You can just do anything you want. Yeah, and so Maniac Which incorporates everything I want. I played a Kaleidophon with it, which is the controller using all the stuff in Maniac and Maniac actually allows us both Mike my partner the other half of White Noise My painter uses about half of Maniac, and the other half I use as a sampler. And anything you want, you can make. And the sound quality is superb on that. It does sampling not just with a plain old sampler. It has beat loop samplers, so you can do really funky stuff with the rhythm. Jumping it around, it'll stay in time to beats even though you're throwing them all over the place. It'll have... Really serious internal resampling that will allow you to get right in the size of sounds and do interesting things. It'll shift the formats and everything as you want them to. And it'll do everything else. Sampling is just one thing it does. Um, so you can integrate that with everything else. And I really think the secret is the integration. I don't want to do just sampling. Or just synthesizers. But why not have everything under the one string on a kaleidophone? I've got two... different kind of samplers that reinforce each other as most samplers do, but also do different types of things. So it covers everything, as well as a lead and bass line, as well as four part harmony with 16 oscillators that do quite amazing things. All literally under each finger. Yeah. Why not? Yeah, indeed, absolutely. So, last question. Um, Is there a place for a Fairlight in the 21st century? I mean, we've kind of come full circle, haven't we? It was one of the first computer based musical instruments that then had a sequencer. Nowadays, we now live back in the box. We can do everything there. But the Fairlight, the Fairlight's character, its primitive nature, you know, is there a place for it nowadays, or have we lost that? That's a really difficult question to answer. I feel like I'm perhaps being disloyal to Peter with my answer. Um, Peter Vogel, of course, we're talking about, who invented the Fairlight. Yes. Um, I've really come to the conclusion that brand loyalty doesn't pay in electronic music. Sure. Companies that come along with one thing and they're wonderful, like EMS, VCS3. Peter Vogel, I'm a Fairlight. But other things come along that really do supersede. And a lot of the Fairlight sounds I still use. Yes. But I've, um, imported them into, well, actually into Reaktor, which I can't think of anything beyond. But who knows, you know? Indeed. Um, I'll be dead one day and the world will be different. I guess, I guess, but maybe my motivation for that question was that you, nowadays, So many musicians that I speak to have huge sample libraries. They have piles of, of drives containing all sorts of, uh, brilliant and deep sample libraries that have been created by a company such as Spitfire audio or something like that. Um, and what seems to have been lost, although it hasn't been completely lost thankfully, is that art of creating new unheard sounds. The likes of, uh, maybe yourself, Peter Gabriel, uh, and those early pioneers of sampling, who, who went out and smashed television sets, or threw things down guttering, to, to get sounds and rhythms. And that seems to have, in my opinion, seems to have been lost over the, over the years. And I'll tell you the, what they're losing out on then, because it's quite true, there are all these amazing, um, sample libraries you can get. And they do sound like motion pictures, but they all sound more or less the same. And this is something that's happened as music's progressed. We can get very polished stuff, but everybody sounds like everybody else. Vocalists, too. Um, it's a shame that... There's so many new techniques around, and yet people all sound the same, but you use auto tune on something to tune a voice. It does what it says it does, but it has its own sound. So all, particularly female vocalists, are replaceable. Yeah, by other vocalists that you can't tell one from another. It's actually the sound of autotune. And it's very much that way with sample libraries. They all sound the same and they all sound like a standard motion picture. And those end up generally being the sort of has beens because people think, yes, it sounds like a proper motion picture, like all the other motion pictures. Serious top directors don't want to sound like all the last years and the year before's directors. They want to come up with something new. And exactly the same applies in music. If you want to be you or somebody special, something unique, you've got to make unique sounds. And so you're not going to make anything unique if you're using standard libraries. You're going to be like everybody else. I was really interested to hear the soundtrack of a TV show recently, which was called Chernobyl, about the nuclear disaster that happened there. And the composer actually travelled out to Chernobyl and sampled... Elements of the town. So, you know, she was banging on brickwork and pipework and sampling noises. And then went back and created this soundtrack which was of the place. And for me, that is the true essence of sampling. Even though Peter Vogel created digital sampling to work around that problem of not being able to recreate natural acoustic instruments electronically. It was a cheat, and he would, you know, he admits to that, um, but it was that, that use of, um, sampling as a tool to create the previously unheard that I think we're, we're missing greatly still today. David: And it wasn't really cheating because he accidentally discovered a whole new way of making sound. Rob: Quite, yeah. David: And it's not, in fact, necessarily exactly the original sound because it has its, it does things to the sound and you, and of course the interesting thing with samples is to take them further and do things with them you know, the looping, the distorting, the way you can play with them is amazing. But it's doing your own thing, not stuff out of the box. It's gonna get, you're gonna get known for something, even if you happen to have a hit with something which is out of the box, how are you gonna get another one? It's a hit just like all the other hits and it'll be forgotten like everything else and there's no tag on there to remind people it's so and so's sound. Rob: Yeah, brilliant. Well, that's great. Thank-you ever so much. Really appreciate your time. David: You're very welcome. Rob: Thank-you. Thank-you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode where you'll find further information along with web links and details of all the other episodes. And just before you go, let me point you to the soundonsound.com/podcast website page where you can explore what's playing on the other channels. I'm Rob Puricelli, and this has been a Failed Muso production for Sound On Sound.