"I'll tell you a secret about 'Killing Me Softly'. I wanted a Fender Rhodes piano on that track but we didn't have one. So I took a sound in an S900 sampler and put a delay on it and detuned the sampler and played it like a Rhodes and it sounds like one. We just had to invent shit as we went along."

"The drums on 'Pacific State' were actually from a 909, not an 808, and the clap pattern's quite important on it. It's pretty unusual. Also, to add to the sort of tropical nature of things, we added the bird sound from the Akai library that came with the S900. It's called 'Canadian Loon'. Then the track hung about for a fairly long time until the 101 bass line added a nice feel.”

Samplers Akai MPC2000XL percussion sampler with MFC42 filter. Akai S900, S2000 and S5000 samplers.

In an interview on the making of "De La Soul Is Dead", Prince Paul says that the Akai S-900 was his favorite sampler at the time:

"Gino: Did you have a favorite sampler that you were using at the time?

Prince Paul: Probably the S-900. I could navigate that pretty easily. I broke it out recently because I have a couple in racks in my basement. I plugged them in and played some old samples through them. Even though it’s big and bulky, nothing sounds like that. It’s pretty flexible, it’s easy to work, and it’s easy to truncate your sample and get things tight. You can trigger certain sounds with different keys on the drum machine.

When you look at all this new technology, everything sounds very sterile. Everything is clean and super quiet. It kind of lacks something. When I plug that in, it’s like, 'Wow, this is hip hop.' It makes a big difference…a way bigger difference than having an MPC or something. It has its own character. Certain pieces of equipment make you program a certain way because you are limited. That’s the beauty of those machines."

The insert from the Casiopea Perfect Live II record lists Akira Jimbo's gear used during the concert, listing the S-900

In this interview from 1997 Rudy give a list of the gear used at the time.

Mastelotto isn't shy with electronics. He used "a fair amount of samples" for composite snare sounds, including three alone for "King for a Day," played on a Roland Octopad, and the overtone of "a very ringy Ludwig similar to a tube-lug snare" sampled on an Akai S900. The drummer and his tech Paul Mitchell bent the samples with a warp function "to a note that sounded good" for each track. Tabourine-shaker, congas, tablas and other oriental percussion came from Casio FZ-1 samplers. A Yamaha RX5 drum machine crops up on the fade of "Hold Me My Daddy"; elsewhere Mastelotto used an MX8 MIDI patch bay to increase the velocity of a LinnDrum fed into a Yamaha QX2 program. An old Simmons SD55's kicks and snares are on "Chalkhills and Children" and "Poor Skeleton Steps Out." There's a Pearl SC-40 on "Cynical Days" -- "similar to a tambourine but more of a bongo" -- and "Garden of Earthly Delights," "for a low kick that bends up like a tabla." "Garden" also employs a Roland TR727 drum loop. And Mastelotto still uses sticks: Pro-Mark 5Bs or 909s, "butt-end."

At 0:03, two S900s can be seen stacked on top of one another, and at 1:58, Freddie mentions them.

In an Instagram post, Easy Mo Bee shares a photo featuring the Akai S900 MIDI Digital Sampler, accompanied by a caption stating, "Ok.. enough is enough. Time for some repair service on my babies. Just because... I want every single knob, lamp, flywheel, disk drive, etc in premium working order. I've done some incredible things with these tools and they deserve to be in tip top shape."

A user-uploaded photo shows DJ Yella in a studio session with Dr. Dre, likely contributing to N.W.A's production, with an Akai S900 MIDI Digital Sampler visible in the setup.

In an audience Q&A for Red Bull Music Academy, Public Enemy producer Hank Shocklee describes using the Akai S-900 (among other samplers) for drum sounds:

"So, you know, a [E-mu SP] 1200 is not the only drum machine, and you’ve seen a lot of articles that we’ve been quoted about using the 1200. No, the 1200 was one of them. The other one we would put drum sounds in the S-900 as well."

And for bass:

"Another thing that we used which was for bass, the S-900 has a tone. Everybody knows probably a trick that, you know that trick came from us. When you take the 1000 Hz tone before you put a disc into the machine, you turn it on, and if you play the keys you know how you get that one tone. Well, if you play that in a lower register, you get the bass. And we used that bass sound for everything because it sounded like no other bass instrument that we could get.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Was it the bassline or a kick drum?

HANK SHOCKLEE

Both, yeah, we used it as both. We used it as a kick drum, we just truncated and added an attack piece into it so that would be the kick drum. We would take it and elongate it, add a little attack and elongate it and that’s the 808 bass that we feel. And when you listen to the Public Enemy records and you listen to the 808 on those records, well that 808 is not an 808 that we have taken, like Marley Marl… going back to Marley again.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Poor Marley. [audience laughs]

HANK SHOCKLEE

No, it’s not a diss or anything. I’m just trying to – so you have something to differentiate from – is that he would take the 808 and pretty much use the 808 from the TR-808 drum machine, you know? I didn’t want to do that because there is an inherent, distinct tone that comes from that that identifies that particular machine. And I didn’t want you to identify that particular machine so I wanted to use the tone isolated from the S-900 was my bass on the records..."

Per Sound On Sound, May 2005:

"The very first sampler we had was a Roland F10," recalls Simpson, "and then we went with the Akai S900. Those were still mono samplers. Then we dabbled with the SP12, the predecessor of the SP1200, and then we had a Roland S770, which I think was the first stereo sampler.