This is the second Fairlight I've worked on. My client, who also owns a Fairlight IIx, brought me this Fairlight III that was once owned by Jane Child. You can see this very instrument all over the video of her 1989 hit Don't Want to Fall in Love.

 

I had some help from various members of the Fairlight community to get this one up and running again. Big thanks to Peter Wielk, who is a former Fairlight employee, for all the help with pin outs, and getting me started. He also built the OS this one is running. And Joe Britt for the help on the USB keyboard/mouse interface. I installed the circuit Joe designed that allows the Fairlight to use a modern USB keyboard and mouse to navigate.

 

Originally, this had a hard drive and a tape drive installed. I removed both drives, and used the space to mount the SCSI2SD drive and USB2CMI circuit. I cut a small square of tinted plexiglass to fill in the space. All sound libraries are accessible via the SD drive.

 

I mounted all of the new jacks on a blank panel on the back of the Fairlight. I also made some new cables to connect the keyboard, and a DB25 to XLR breakout for the main mix output. Other work included new fitler capacitors for the analog power supply, rework on some of the channel cards, new Lithium battery, new foam filters, and new SCSI cables.

Click on pictures for higher res photos:

Formerly owned by Jane Child