Well I don’t know where to start; it’s been a long time, so here goes…

I started my career back in 1975 in London, passed through a maintenance phase (Sound Developments in Chalk Farm), then progressed to Tape-Op/Assistant Engineer (Nova Studios Marble Arch in 1977) and very quickly became a self employed Recording Engineer working at most of the high end studios in the South of England (1978 onwards). My exposure to “LS” logic design while at Sound Developments would go un-noticed till 8 years later.

As a side line I also designed (at the wiring level not acoustics) and installed many large studios in Central London, Utopia (Blue Room), Air-Edel (George Martin), Battery Studio 4 (Mutt Langer), Red Bus 1 & 2, Snake Ranch (Richard Harvey), Lillie Yard (Hans Zimmer), RedWood (Monty Python) among others.

Around 1978 I met Hans Zimmer for the first time at Nova Studios; he was doing Jingles as a session musician. At the same time another little known producer called Trevor Horn (with Geoff Downs) was also working at Nova. If I recall correctly the band being recorded was called Chromium. Trevor needed a Synth player/programmer for this project and this is where Hans Zimmer with his Prophet 5 and Roland MC8 (and other stuff) stepped in. A few other projects were recorded by Trevor, Geoff and Hans over the next 12 months or so, and then came the first hit, Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles. Next time you see the video keep and eye out for Hans near the end playing inside his “walk in” Synth.

Hans and I got on like a house on fire, we were both young, technical, loved computers (this is before the PC), he excelled at his musical abilities, I did my best to support him.

Hans teamed up with composer Stanley Myers around 1981, between them bought a Series I Fairlight and built Lillie Yard Studios. The Series I at the time did not have Page R, the only sequencer you could “Edit” was MCL (Music Composition Language), so Hans would Score the Music (by pen a paper), I would enter it into MCL then record it. Perfect team work!

One of the problems at this time (1981’ish) was SMPTE was still to make a big impact in Recording Studios, so other methods to synchronize sequencers were implemented by the sequencer manufactures, there were 2 kinds, FSK (Frequency Shift Keying) used by Linn and Roland, and a Sine Wave Tone used by Fairlight. Problem, how do you Sync two systems with different Sync systems? (MIDI was yet to be invented)

I sat down with some wire-wrap tools and from my brief experience with logic gates back in 1976 I designed a board that plugged into a Series I (and later II and IIX) that would output all the clocks for virtually every other sequencer on the market. The board was called “The Conductor”, (Thanks for the name Hans). Almost every Series I, II and IIX in the UK would end up having at least one of these cards, and some would have two (Mine had three – no more slots left!). Each Conductor Card would synchronize two external systems so a system with two cards could control 4 systems and of coarse the Fairlight sequencers, making 5 sequencers total. The board was developed without any help from Fairlight in Sydney, Australia. The conductor derived all its clocks from the “Master Card”.

In 1982 I went to Sydney to show the board to Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie who both laughed at the design, they both said they could do the same thing on one or two chips and would not manufacture the board. Alas, the UK market became saturated, what do you expect, only 50 Fairlight systems were in the UK) and other devices were coming onto the market that could do a similar thing, namely the “Friend Chip” and another box called “Dr. Click”. The Conductor was never marketed in the USA or anywhere else, only the UK.

I worked as a freelance Fairlight Programmer (and Engineer) for the next few years, working with many artists (Google “Steve Rance Fairlight Engineer”), the work load was high, I was earning money during the day and working with Hans on our own personal projects at night… all night. Many times I would be so tired I would drop in, fall asleep and never drop out wiping something important. Hans would go Mad!

The Fairlight IIx at the time was lacking features that I wanted; it was time to work out how this thing worked and modify it. I reverse engineered the system, slowly, learning 6809 Machine Code and eventually managed to write some programs for it, not big ones but enough to get me interested in programming. I wrote a Film Music Processor, a Page R to MCL conversion program (just for fun) and a few games that I sent out on 8” floppies to other Fairlight owners as XMAS presents!

I upgraded to a Series III, I believe I had the first or second one in the UK (Steve Levine producer of Culture Club among many others may have had the first). The Series III was based on a new Operating System called OS9, now I did not have to reverse engineer anymore, Fairlight in Sydney were very helpful in getting me going writing my own programs. For those who have a Series III my first experimental pages are still in the system (“DDP” or “DP” for Donnas Display Page, Donna was my first wife!), “TC” a TimeCode Calculator, and the Editor on “RS” the Rhythm Sequencer.

My next visit to Sydney resulted in my leaving the UK and working for Fairlight as a programmer. I revamped the Page R or the Rhythm Sequencer totally, wrote a now obsolete TimeCode Trigger Page (“TT”) which was eventually replaced by CueList (“CL”). CAPS with Michael Carlos, FX, DIR, SC, almost everything except WE (Waveform Editor) and FL (Flanger). I had my hands all areas of the Series III software.

After Fairlight’s unfortunate demise in late 1989 and its resurrection in early 1990 I wrote pretty much everything with a small team of highly skilled programmers, in particular Michael Carlos, Andrew Cannon and Chris Alfred.

After 20 odd years working at Fairlight in Sydney I left the company, I had already written MFX I, MFX II, MFX III MFX 3+, QDC, and writing the next generation (Crystal-Core) didn’t excite me anymore. I didn’t move far, I now own and run FairlightUS Inc distributing Fairlight products in the USA, I still have a very tight relationship with R&D in Sydney. Although didn’t have much to do with Crystal-Core, some of my code is used on every Crystal-Core software upgrade.

What Peter and Kim said back in 1982 about my “Conductor” board being able to be done on one chip is now very amusing, the entire Crystal-Core engine _is_ now done on ONE chip, 230 channels, 72 mix busses all with 8 bands of EQ, 3 stage Dynamics _and_ and 192 track disk recorder. Who would have believed it?

Sorry for moving off topic, I started off with SMPTE and the Conductor and forgot to stop.

I hope you enjoyed reading this; I look forward to replying to any questions.
[Steve Rance]