Mostly hardware rack samplers. I think Liam used (uses?) Akai S1100 or a similar model. You play in chunks of audio to them, trim the waveform to the part you need, optionally build a keyboard-split/layered patch with it, and then play it via MIDI. They also have some envelopes for pitch modulation and other stuff you can use.
You can do this with sounds you make yourself (The Prodigy frequently samples their own synthesizers) or to anything you play in.
The sequencing would have been done with a hardware sequencer (unlikely) or a PC tracker or MIDI sequencer (more likely.) Record the outputs onto tape for mixing at the studio.
Exactly my point. This stuff was way harder without all these nice comfy ProTools and ACID GUIs. The keyboards never had interfaces that were easy to use when doing things like trimming waveforms. Must have been hella tedious.
Especially back when most CPUs were about 200MHz tops, drives were much smaller, and turning on a single reverb brought everything to a screaming halt. (Freezing trax was not an option.)
One of the better DAWs at the time was Opcode's Vision (still is, tho they went out of business back then)(Live didn't exist, Pro Tools didn't have MIDI worth mentioning) and the first decent plug-ins were just being released... nothing worked together and crashes were frequent.
Very tedious ... not to dis this production which is madly skilled. I'm still not convinced that Prodigy did all that in software.
Yeah, the Akai's were pretty powerful samplers back then. Depeche Mode did everything on E-mu Emulators. For the rest of us it was the Ensoniqs...
Think of it as sound "hacking". Before samplers all we had were tape loops and synths. Samplers were a ton of fun because suddenly you could play any sound, including people's voices. It was a revolutionary new approach in the late 80s & early 90s...
You can do this with sounds you make yourself (The Prodigy frequently samples their own synthesizers) or to anything you play in.
The sequencing would have been done with a hardware sequencer (unlikely) or a PC tracker or MIDI sequencer (more likely.) Record the outputs onto tape for mixing at the studio.