WORKING FOR


So from 2001 up until 2003, when they went bust, I worked for a company called Fairlight. A little background for you: 25 years ago Fairlight was the company that more or less invented the sampler – which is now as ubiquitous in the sound production world as the fork is in the kitchen. After a brief, but again, legendary foray into the Video processing world, they later focused on developing Hard disk recording and editing systems for the post-production industry. This meant building the machines that editors and mixers use to prepare sound for picture. All the audio you hear on TV, in Film etc... has all been through a post-production process, and it is in this highly exciting, specialised and demanding market that Fairlight, again, became something of a world player. When I was working for them, Fairlight had offices in about 10 countries all over the world, and a staff of 50 people here in Sydney alone, where we actually designed, developed, assembled, tested and released the gear.

The role of my department, Product Management, was something of a steering wheel for the R&D team where we would specify what we wanted and the R&D team would make it happen. We would then test and manage the process of releasing this to the wide world.

My role as assistant product manager was a challenging one. In a tight relationship with Tino Fibaek, head of the R&D team, I was responsible for alpha testing much of the new DREAM series of products. I also acted as point of contact for the first users of the gear and would assess and pass feedback on to R&D. There was quite a bit of support too, having to liaise with both the local offices in giving them pointers on how to set up and run the gear as well as deal with the occasional front line customer who wanted to know why his surface kept crashing in the middle of doing mixes of the new Kylie Minogue DVD.

This is no exaggeration – Andy Richards in London, the first recipient of a DREAM console had as his first big project recording and mixing the new Kylie DVD, double live album and hour long TV special designed to break her into the U.S Market– this gig was enormously high profile and also high tension owing to the ‘just out of development’ nature of the machine. We all saw endless late nights on the phone with Andy working out his problems and him constantly pushing the envelope of what was possible to the point where we were shoveling new versions of the code into his machine every night for him to start work with in the morning his time. High excitement, high stress.

This was in incredibly rewarding, challenging and interesting period for me. Working closely with some of the very best heads in the world in their particular field (Fairlight went on an overseas recruiting mission some years ago and as a result ended up with a bunch of the best of the best) and seeing the rapid development of some totally cutting edge and literally ‘dream’ audio machines was a total blast.

Right up until when it all went bad. Fairlight was placed under voluntary administration in March and since then some new very small company has been formed to buy up the Intellectual Property and try and keep the flag waving. Unfortunately no-one from my entire department is involved in the new company. Apart from the occasional rumour I have no real idea of how they’re doing – I wish them well.

Here are some pics from this period...

Andy's DREAM Consoles being prepped




DREAM Close-up The Legendary CMI




What were they thinking? On the wall of Andy's Studio




My Scribble is in there somewhere Moving so fast...




My crazy colleague Brett Ah, my little servo...




Jeez, I hope I don't get in trouble for using these images...
(thanks to Ian Stevenson for photos of me, Servo and Brett, thanks to Ross Caston and other Fairlight crew for the others...)

And if any old Fairlight crew are reading this - hi!!!