Bitley Sounds & ReFills has announced the release of Bundlesrepublik Elektronika which is, with its 7,000 patches, the result of Bitley's soon 10 year old journey of resampling and rebuilding the Fairlight CMI library to work in Kontakt and Reason.
Bitley (Patrick Fridh) got thumbs up from Australia and what at the time was Fairlight P.L.C. and Fairlight Instruments. In Sweden, Bil Bryant was kind enough to connect him with these companies while also confident in Bitley's line of previous work with Ensoniq EPS / ASR libraries, synth patches for JX10, K4, TX81Z, VZ series, running the worldwide support at Propellerhead Software and creating Reason and ReCycle factory settings / patches for Malström, consulting Clavia with Nord Modular patching / Micro Modular conceptualisation as well as working for Bil's own company Power FX creating soundbanks like The Dream Machine, R and Reason Season Winter.
Bitley had access to a Fairlight IIx and says this is where the plan was formed. His vision was to first redesign the building blocks seeking to emulate the raw Fairlight and then to use that as a foundation for more creative work. Combining this with sampling instruments that often would surround a Fairlight in studios during its heyday. Recently, Bitley has also been working with Arturia creating factory patches for Pigments.
Bitley's inspiration was Yello, Art Of Noise, Enigma, Yazoo, Yes, Tears For Fears, Paul Young, Peter Gabriel, Scritti Politti, Howard Jones, Pet Shop Boys, A-ha and so on: artists that often were using the Fairlight CMI.
Bitley says the goal was not "only" to recreate the Fairlight but what was accomplished with it, building sonic bridges to more modern libraries, considering the low fidelity 8 bit sound mixed and matched with cleaner sounds, wanting to investigating that further.
Bitley's view is that samplers ideally should sound like in the old hardware days.
The libraries all contain a plethora of drums, basses, pads, bells, leads, keyboard sounds, sound effects and even a selection of Synclavier sounds. Things were recorded in different velocity layers and programmed using individual tricks of Kontakt, NN-XT and the Combinator in Reason and Bitley claims he never translated patches between the programs as it wouldn't work as intended, so therefore all the Kontakt work meant practically reprogramming each patch, which in turn lead the products to become quite different. He says it might be interesting to check out both if the user has access to them. He also says working in Reason also rendered him to make patches for Thor, Subtractor, Malström and some rack extension instruments, which is a further explanation of how the Reason and Kontakt versions differ.
Signature patches were provided by Python Blue, Navi Retlav, EditEd4TV and a few others who got inspired to be a part of the patch programming process.
YouTube.com/watch?v=BdbpWJAmrAg
Bundlesrepublik Elektronika or "BE" is Bitley's way of bundling the four banks Fairlight Kontakt R3, Dreampads, Way Beyond Fairlight R2 and R2X.
The three "BE" options are Reason ($129), Kontakt ($129) or both ($199).
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