If you'd like to get your hands on Vince's classic analogue sounds, or if you simply want to expand your collection of bleeps, blips, bangs and booms, the answer is Lucky Bastard, the new sampling CD that Vince has produced with AMG. In fact, Music Technology, having been instrumental in the conception of the CD, witnessed its recording while we chatted to Vince. It features an entirely new collection of synth sounds, loops, rhythms and effects, all programmed on the fly by Vince over two days in his Amsterdam studio. As well as tracks of completely original material, AMG also persuaded Vince to part with the myriad sounds and effects used on the Phantasmagorical Entertainment tour. You might say it's the first 100% analogue CD in captivity...

The recording was undertaken by Matthew Wilkinson and Lee Groves of AMG, and on the way to Vince's studio Lee explained just what goes into the making of a CD with over 1000 individual sounds and loops. "The process itself is ridiculously simple: we just plug a DAT machine into the outputs of Vince's mixing console, and set it recording as he programs on the fly. Anything interesting he stumbles across will be preserved as part of one continuous recording. We don't EQ or add any effects; the only time the whole thing stops is when we change DATs!

"After the session is over, I then take the DAT back to my studio and load all the sounds into DigiDesign's Sound Tools, running on my Apple Mac. I chop them up, edit them, time them, give them names and assemble them in a large Playlist. That's what takes the time: if you had to think up individual names for 1000 samples, you'd understand why! From there, the samples are recorded digitally back onto DAT, transferred to a U-Matic master, and sent off to PDO to be pressed into a CD."

1 Minimoog

"Well, it's an analogue synth! This one I usually use for bass sounds and percussion things - hi-hats, snares and so on. It's a nicely designed synth, lovely bit of tropical rain forest wood panelling..."

2 Oberheim Xpander

"I love this because you can patch everything internally... it's almost - almost - like a modular system. Everything is crosspatchable; nearly everything can be modulated by everything else. And one of the nicest things about it is that it has MIDI and CV/Gate - it was part of that inbetween period. We used this extensively on the last tour: I used it as two sources, left and right, to get independent sounds."

3 Roland SH09

"I also have the SH1 over there, just as a general analogue keyboard. I don't use this for bass, because it's not quite heavy enough. It has a nice, tight envelope though, unlike the Minimoog, which is a bit too loose for my taste."

4 Roland Jupiter 8

"This is very new to me, actually. I have a Juno-60, and I've had a JP-4, but the Jupiter 8 I've never really understood. But we used it on the tour because it's one of the few analogue keyboards that you can program - which is obviously important on tour. The Minimoog was used for basses on the tour, but because you can't program it, I was manually changing the sounds all the time - which is why the basses sounded so appalling! I don't use the Jupiter 8 a lot, but it does have some nice clean sounds."

5 Oberheim ObieRack

"This I really like. I'd love one of the original Obie 4-voice ones, which I'd buy if I had the chance, but this is my compromise in the meantime. I'm having it converted back to CV and Gate, because it's been MIDI'd, unfortunately!"

6 Roland Super Jupiter MKS-80

"We bought these for touring again, because you can program them and memorise the sounds. I'm not that keen on it. It's supposed to be a rack version of the Jupiter 8 - which is probably why I don't like it much."

7 RSF Kobol

"I've had this for about ten or eleven years. It came out about the same time as the Sequential Circuits Pro One, and it was unique - it had a memory again. I started using this to program up for the tour, and I was getting on really well with it, memorising all the programs up, until I realised that it only had 16 programs and we had 30 songs to do - so I had to start again on something else! There's a really weird sequencer on it as well; it doesn't sequence notes, it sequences between sounds. Strange...

8 PPG Waveterm 2.2

"This is a complete mystery to me. I've never heard one in its full glory, and I'd like to get the original sounds to load into it. Ten years ago it apparently sounded great, so it might just be the sounds in this one that discourage me."

9 Roland Juno-60

"Oh, I love this. I don't know why; it's just the sound of it. The chorus, the ultra-noisy chorus on it, is really special. It has a wonderfully sharp envelope on it as well. All these Roland synths, incidentally, have to be connected to CV and Gate via OB-8 interfaces."

10 Sequential Circuits Pro One

"I've had this for 12 years. I love my Pro Ones. It's one of the keenest synths going, much better than the Pro Five. The envelope - yet again - is sharp. This gets used for a lot of the drum sounds, particularly bass drums. It also has an interesting modulation effect."

11 Moog Source

"This is one I've never used. I'm still trying to get it to work over CV and Gate..."

12 E-mu Modular

"Not such nice woodwork on this one! Really, really keen sound though. I like the keyboard as well. The sequencer is interesting: it's digital, worked via a little numeric keypad. This one came from the USA. Feel the pots on that - they're lovely. Look at the quality. They don't make 'em like that any more, guv..."

13 Modular Moog

"...Or rather, bits of a Modular Moog. It's from the States again. I'm not as enamoured with it as you might think. I know the traditional image of analogue synthesis means that people think you have to have one of these, it's a sort of legend; but it's really not that incredible in terms of filtering and things. It's nothing like the other Moogs - you can't compare it to a Minimoog or Polymoog, it has a completely different sound. Lovely spring reverb module as well - I like spring reverbs in synths. But it's nice because it's cross-patchable. That's an end in itself for me."

14 ARP 2500

"Wonderful early synth, this. As you can see, rather than using cords to cross-patch everything, it has a network of sliders. Say you want an oscillator on this section; you just turn that slider up to four, and then turn the slider of the oscillator up to four as well. It simply routes them together. Nice little system, that. You can even colour-code your patches by taking the tops off the sliders and arranging them according to your patch. It also has one of those useful 10-step sequencers - as they all did in the early days - for a Tangerine Dream-type effect. That allows you to set up little loops that don't appear to have a first beat. I use it a fair bit. The filter is really weird and harsh, which is strange. It's beautifully built compared to some of the other synths, which are often put together in someone's back yard. You can spend a fortune putting things right on these beauties, but this one's immaculate."

15 Roland System 100

"I've always had bits of System 100s, always. I've just extended it really, adding more modules, although I'm not really collecting them any more. There are little submixers and things which I could get, but they're not that useful to me. It's a great sounding synth; really rich. Plenty of bollocks. I use it a great deal."

16 ARP 2600

"When I first met Daniel Miller at Sarm Studios with Depeche, this was his first synth. We all loved it, even though we couldn't work out how the hell it worked. We'd be on it for hours. There are some really interesting things on it, like the Keyboard CV Output, which is actually an input! This really is a fantastic synth: brilliant sounding, heavy-duty, really sharp envelope. There are actually two kinds of envelope on it - ADSR [Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release] and AR [Attack & Release]. Nice spring reverb, two speakers - who could ask for more?"

17 Polyfusion Modular

"What can I say about this? It's really heavy-duty sounding. Don't you just love the different noise filters and mod sources - white noise, pink noise and infra-red! I'd like to get more modules for this; it's really clean-sounding. But they're quite hard to get hold of. This isn't the original rack, actually."

18 Roland System 700

"Same as the 100, but bigger! They just got better at it as they went along, I suppose. This has all the multi-mode filters, delays and analogue switching. The sequencer is another oddball; it has 12 notes, so if you're into waltzes, I suppose this is the one to get..."

19 Serge

"You know, the guy who made this is still making these synths. I've forgotten his name... Sid Serge, I suppose. Something like that. Anyway, it's modular: you can buy these modules to build up as big or small a synth as you like. Nice touch sensitive sequencer keyboard here, great for jazzy stuff. The filters are wonderfully drastic as well."

20 Synthi VCS3

"I've finally got to grips with this. I had this for two years and couldn't work out for the life of me how to get decent sounds out of it. The manual had all those crappy factory patches, like 'Thunder' and 'Waves'. It's also a classic example of the manufacturer making up any old names to suit the knobs, because this belongs to the days when they had no standard jargon at all. But the books for this are excellent, because these were sold to colleges to teach people how to use synths. This one came from a college, I think..."

21 Roland SH1

"Early version of the SH09. Next!"

22 Syrinx

"This is an interesting sounding synth. It has a touch-sensitive whammy bar as a mod source! That's quite a good effect, actually. And look at that colour - electric blue. You just can't beat it."

23 Korg MS20

"What can you say?"

24 ARP Sequencer

"You have to mention this. This is invaluable. It's like my jazz sequencer; you can't do the sort of things you can do on this on any MIDI sequencer that I know of. You can't beat being able to mess about with the faders and get an interesting effect, switching on rhythms and things. This is the way all sequencers should be built. I'm getting a 6-voice version of this built at the moment - someone's copying the design for me. But it's just fantastic - so instant and fast. And it has that Random function, for when you want to do a jazzy middle-eight. Love it!"