Andrew Eldritch

Unfortunately the midi retrofit was expensive. 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."

"The Doktor was an Oberheim DMX by the time we made the first album. The Oberheim had a (relatively) huge memory, it would synchronise accurately to tape via FSK and the memory could be backed up reliably onto cassette. Each drum was tunable (inside), and Oberheim offered a few alternative sounds. Events could be programmed to happen around the beat, not just on it. The DMX would flam happily. We liked the Oberheim better than the LinnDrum, which was more expensive and sounded too sterile. The DMX kicks were a bit flabby, and the snare was maybe not quite tight enough; the tom-toms were good. And a new age was dawning: soon it became possible to send the DMX back to the factory and have ... midi! put on it."

"In the early nineties, as acid house was developing a cult around this drum machine, it was suddenly very fashionable to riff along to TR808 sounds. We did that almost ten years earlier, when the cocktail drinking classes and the NME thought it was a bloody stupid idea. (One wet afternoon in the early eighties, we switched the Doktor to play the usual stuff but twice as fast. Hey presto! Drum'n'bass! This was interesting for about ten minutes. Even Cabaret Voltaire couldn't manage to make it interesting for much longer. Please don't tell us it's interesting now.)

The TR808 was really the first serious drum machine. The kick and snare still needed savage eq (and they didn't take kindly to it), the tom-toms were a complete waste of time, but otherwise it was a decent machine. Individual outputs, tunable drums, enough memory. Ben Gunn once managed to press the TR808's dangerous red button as we were about to go onstage in Brussels, so Andrew had to reprogram the whole damn machine while everybody else was tuning their guitars up (slowly). "

"If we can remember rightly, it had only four sounds: kick, snare, rimshot and hi-hat. One mono output, of course. For programming, it had an eight-beat stave, and sequencing was performed by switching on the fly between the few patterns it would hold in RAM. The DR55 had no non-volatile memory or offload facility for storing these patterns when the power was off. Still, reprogramming it was quick enough, as it held so little. It certainly sounded primitive, the biggest problem being the inability to separately treat the sounds of kick and snare, which lacked any kind of attack... unless one turned the volume up to excruciating levels, which of course one did. It didn't sound bad, exactly, just ... primitive. "

"The Roland TR606 came next. A few more sounds, a bit more memory, and individual volume controls. We liked it. Eventually someone worked out that it was possible to drill holes in the back and gain individual outputs."

We nevertheless upgraded to the Akai S1000 sampler. This is still the core of the onstage Doktor."

Andrew Eldritch utilizes the Roland PC-200 MK II, a compact and affordable MIDI controller. While it may not excel in note-playing, its strength lies in the ability to assign controllers to any controller number, as detailed on the Sisters Tech - Samplers & Synthesis page from The-sisters-of-mercy.

Andrew Eldritch of The Sisters of Mercy utilized the Roland TR-909 Rhythm Composer, noting its cymbal and hi-hat sounds as significant improvements over its predecessor, the TR-808. This is detailed in the "Sisters Tech - Doktor" section on The-sisters-of-mercy website.

"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."

"I use the Korg A2 and Korg A3 multiple effects units on almost everything for livening up synths, for general raunch and increasingly as my main guitar/bass pre-amp."

"I use the Korg A2 and Korg A3 multiple effects units on almost everything - for livening up synths, for general raunch and increasingly as my main guitar/bass pre-amp. I've decided that these Korgs have the world's best (or at least: most useful) distortion. I've tried loads of guitar pre-amps (I've got a Marshall JMP-1, a Rocktron mAXE and an ART SGX2000 which isn't bad), but the Korgs take the biscuit. Of course, they don't make 'em any more. The A2 and the A3 are more or less the same. The A3 has a direct out which is handy; the A2 has a stereo input and a few more algorithms. Both units are attached to the Doktor when it's his turn to play the bass."

"One Tascam DA30 DAT recorder - the standard professional DAT machine (before those dodgy Panasonics took over) and one Tascam DA30II DAT recorder which is not an improvement on the original model."

"Yamaha SPX90, SPX90II and SPX1000 effects units because they're cheap, cheerful and easy to use - and because that original SPX90 nonlinear reverb sound is a bit of a classic. The graininess still sits well with the Doktor's snare drum. Check the kick and snare on 'Flood I' for the SPX nonlinear reverb in overkill mode. Or the whole of 'Gift'. The SPX1000 also provides a standard long plate which was reasonable value for money at the time (and it interfaces digitally with the dead-end MEL2 format used by our old Yamaha DMR8 digital multitrack tape system)."

"Yamaha SPX90, SPX90II and SPX1000 effects units because they're cheap, cheerful and easy to use - and because that original SPX90 nonlinear reverb sound is a bit of a classic. The graininess still sits well with the Doktor's snare drum. Check the kick and snare on 'Flood I' for the SPX nonlinear reverb in overkill mode. Or the whole of 'Gift'. The SPX1000 also provides a standard long plate which was reasonable value for money at the time (and it interfaces digitally with the dead-end MEL2 format used by our old Yamaha DMR8 digital multitrack tape system)."

Adam and Andrew have identical PT24 rigs. Each consists of: •Apple PowerMac 9600 running MacOS 8.0 with 128 Mb RAM •Bit 3 13-slot PCI Expansion Chassis •two Digidesign d24 interface cards •eight Digidesign DSP Farm Cards •one Digidesign 888'24 eight-way A/D D/A interface •two Quantum AV hard drives •Digidesign SMPTE Slave Driver •Zip drive (built into the Mac), DDS2 DAT drive, Jaz drive •the standard bundled Digidesign AudioSuite plug-ins for offline processing •the standard bundled Digidesign TDM plug-ins for real-time eq/delay/dynamics, and •TC Tools (TDM) (delay, reverb, eq, chorus, flanger) •Digidesign DVerb (TDM) (reverb) •Waves TDM Bundle (TrueVerb reverb, Q10 eq, C1 compressor, L1 limiter)

In addition, Andrew has an old PT3 rig consisting of: •Apple PowerMac 8100/80 running MacOS 7.5.1 with 64 Mb RAM •Digidesign 12-slot Nubus Expansion Chassis •three Digidesign i/o cards •seven Digidesign DSP Farm Cards •two Digidesign 888 eight-way A/D D/A interfaces •three Micropolis LT 4 gigabyte AV hard drives •six Quantum Barracuda 4 gigabyte AV hard drives •DDS2 DAT drive and Jaz drive shared with the PT24 rig •the standard bundled Digidesign TDM plug-ins for real-time eq/delay/dynamics, and •Digidesign DVerb (TDM) •Arboretum Hyperprism (TDM) •Waves Q10, L1 (TDM)

"For recording we use an Akai S3200 in case we want to take a digital output."

"We've got a very excellent Mackie 1604 mixer for rehearsing with."

"Yamaha SPX90, SPX90II and SPX1000 effects units because they're cheap, cheerful and easy to use - and because that original SPX90 nonlinear reverb sound is a bit of a classic. The graininess still sits well with the Doktor's snare drum. Check the kick and snare on 'Flood I' for the SPX nonlinear reverb in overkill mode. Or the whole of 'Gift'. The SPX1000 also provides a standard long plate which was reasonable value for money at the time (and it interfaces digitally with the dead-end MEL2 format used by our old Yamaha DMR8 digital multitrack tape system)."