There is an interview around that time with Andrew in which he is bragging about how advanced the Doktor had become and how he made his own samples for use on Floodland. It may be on Hal's site in the interview section. Otherwise, even though this is Doktor specific I think it is relevant and also refers to his page on samplers:Being645 wrote:As far as I remember, 1986 was the time when the first generation of samplers appeared ...
"By the time 'Floodland' was being written, Andrew had spent all the ready cash on a computer and a sequencer, and was looking for a reasonably priced midi drum machine with a tighter snare drum. So he got a Yamaha RX5 for the snare sound (the kick was quite tight too) and wrote the album with that.
Having already abused the sampling delay units of that era (and some very complicated chains of painstakingly-tuned Drawmer gates) to trigger captured drum sounds, the first dedicated samplers were a godsend. Until then, even the AMS delay unit had a maximum seven seconds of memory, and that cost a fortune. A rare treat. Mostly we had only had access to Bel units with a couple of seconds at 8 bit resolution. Both had to be triggered by hand or audio key. By the time 'Floodland' was recorded, we had an
Akai S900 sampler. Like manna from heaven. Most of the drums on 'Floodland' came via the Akai. The DMX toms were resampled from the drum machine and off tape. Resampled RX5 kick, snare and hats formed the rest of the skeleton crew. We've been creating samples ever since, but we don't collect much any more; one encounters the same old samples circulating the globe under different names. Some of them sound suspiciously like they've been sampled off Sisters records.
It's been a long time since we changed one of the Doktor's standard voices. We've created and collected a lot of "special effects" drum sounds, but we don't use them live because the sound would vary too wildly from song to song. It's not a practical solution unless you have everything submixed with automation - or running off a tape machine, like certain electronic bands we know (and all of the very famous ones we don't know). They might as well just play the record. We like a bit of risk, and we like to be able to tinker with things from concert to concert.
The Akai S900 is still a perfectly fine drum sampler. Its grainy sound can be an advantage. We nevertheless upgraded to the
Akai S1000 sampler. This is still the core of the onstage Doktor. For recording we use an Akai S3200 in case we want to take a digital output. The various merits of these two samplers are discussed briefly on the Samplers page."
http://www.thesistersofmercy.com/tech/doktors.htm
... aha, thanks for these details ... 
