2022 FROM MARS

Get Everything we Sampled in 2022

2022 was a huge year for us, marking the single biggest update we've ever made to the collection: Vinyl Samples! After years of dreaming, we finally pressed our own record and sampled it ... twice! Vinyl Drums is the best selling pack we've ever made, and the (brand new) Vinyl Synths is easily one of our best synth packs to date. Vinyl Drums allowed us to extensively sample our acoustic kit, and Vinyl Synths enabled us to sample 15 new synthesizers that aren't in the collection. The results of both packs speak for themselves, and if ever there was a time to upgrade your collection, it might be now 😅.

Vinyl Synths

Our latest release, Vinyl Synths is a collection of 30 of our favorite synthesizers, pressed to vinyl, sampled, and mapped into 215 playable vinyl instruments, ranging from Hi Fi analog, to Lo Fi, dusty and degraded. We've become obsessed with the sound of vinyl - it's our favorite recording medium! By pressing synths to a record (clean, processed, and effected), we can impart an analog punch, dusty grit, and vintage flavor that allows melodic elements to cut through a mix, much like vinyl drums do. Not only can the medium glue certain sounds together, but it also imparts all sorts of artifacts, by pitching the record, warbling it by hand, reversing, creating pitch dives, and so much more. 

The results: dusty subs, gritty chords, warbly pads, ethereal leads, classic house organs, italo basses, warm strings, vocoder patches, cosmic effects, and entire batch of percussive, vinyl synth drums. Indeed, the process was much more involved than the above video lets on. You can read more about this extensive (and fun) process here, and see every synth we sampled here. 

Vinyl Drums

Our first foray into cutting our own record, Vinyl Drums was a 6 month+ process of extensively sampling our acoustic drum kit and percussion, pressing the vinyl, and sampling the results. We sampled the record in a mastering studio, and also damaged the vinyl physically, using a variety of cartridges, processing, tape machines and phono stages. The results gave us a huge variety of vinyl drum and percussion samples, ranging from Hi Fi to Lo Fi, degraded, effected, dusty, and everything in between. 

Vinyl Drums is hands-down our best selling pack of all time, and it's no wonder why - all of these sounds were created from scratch in our studio, with extreme care and wild experimentation. For months, we challenged ourselves to turn our acoustic kit into the old skool, hip hop / funk / disco / cosmic rock vinyl drum pack of our dreams. And honestly, I think the results exceeded our expectations. You can read more about the process here. 

The Viscount

While it's necessary to innovate, it's equally important to stick to what we do best - sampling drum machines. So we reached for an in-house favorite : The Viscount.

Known by many as the "Italian Lindrum", the R64 is one of the more mysterious drum machines we've ever sampled. With little to no information online, what we do know is this little rhythm box is FUNKY! The sound comes from 12bit PCM samples, sourced mostly from acoustic percussion, giving the Viscount a punchy quality more akin to a Lindrum or Drumulator than a CR78. But unlike these classic EPROM based machines, the Viscount sports analog sounding cymbal samples, giving the unit a unique, hybrid flavor all its own.... Like a lo-fi Lindrum crossed with an 808 🤤. 

With multi-sampled one-hits at various pitches and processes, and all factory patterns included as loops, the Viscount From Mars is the most extensively sampling of this machine in existence - you can read more about our process here.

The MR10

Yet another in-house favorite, the MR10 is an unassuming powerhouse of an analog rhythm machine packed in a little box. Simple, funky, and filled with melodic noise (likely due to its small power supply), this thing just signs. Almost like a more tune-able 808 crossed with a CR-78, its sound is familiar, yet almost completely untapped by producers. This pack contains every possible one-shot, as well as our favorite loops at a couple different tunings - so now you can use this weirdo machine in your music!

The Takeaway

Instead of trying to sample as many things as possible this year, we finally faced the larger and more rewarding sample projects we'd dreamt of, like Vinyl Drums and Vinyl Synths. These two packs are instant SFM classics, and add something to the collection that was truly missing. The 2022 bundle is worth the price of admission from these packs alone, and allows you to compose deeply analog, dusty music, completely royalty free. We all have vinyl samples, but these are truly created from scratch, by hand, with love, in our studio. And now they're ready for you, along with two rare drum machines 🥁.