The clanging metallic rhythms and triumphant orchestral hits that soundtracked Terminator 2: Judgment Day were the work of one human, Brad Fiedel, and a couple machines. This Fairlight CMI Series III was one of them.
Restored by Deftaudio's Andrei Kudryavtsev, the classic sampler workstation is now ready for the present and future, maybe even Judgment Day's far-future date of… 2029.
As Andrei writes in his listing description: "If you've been tracking Fairlight sales, you probably saw my other restoration work. All systems that I sell are completely restored and refurbished to the original condition, as much as possible. They are also upgraded to modern standards providing better reliability and usability. This system is not the exception. It's the legendary Fairlight owned by Brad Fiedel and used on T2 score. It took me over a year to finish this build."
In a 2016 interview with Red Bull Music Academy, Fiedel shared part of his music-making process for the film. "In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, I had some compositional capability on my two Fairlight CMIs," Fiedel said. "I had all my percussive stuff in one machine, and all the sustains in another."
He continued on to say how the blend of his score and the film's sound effects (made by a separate team) were on the cutting edge of movie sound design: "One director I’d worked with in the past came out of the Hollywood premiere screening of that saying, 'This is definitely starting a new era off.' He was referring to the kind of seamless relationship between music and sound effects, because he couldn’t tell the difference between what I had done and what they had done, and in some cases, there were things I did that were very much sound effects in a sense, though I didn’t intend them to be."
Fiedel's former Fairlight CMI can be yours via Deftaudio's listing here.
If you're interested in learning about Andrei's restoration project, watch the video above. Or if you're interested in learning more about how Fiedel made his score, check out YouTuber Alex Ball's entertaining recreation of it.