2025 FROM MARS

Get Everything we sampled in 2025

2025 was not only our most productive year for sample packs in the past seven years - it was also one of our most creative and exploratory. We leaned hard into musicianship and acoustic instruments with Vinyl Breaks and Indie Tapes, re-approached old favorites with packs like the Vinyl SP and 808 Loops, explored more modern sounds with the Perkons, and even squeezed in a brand new release for Black Friday - the Emulator From Mars, something we’ve been dying to sample forever.

The result is a bundle that bridges everything we love: the tactile grit of hardware, the discipline of sampling, and a focus on the art of making sounds - not just documenting gear.

As always, this bundle brings together every single release from the year into one collection - your complete 2025 toolkit – but more than that, it’s a snapshot of our studio mindset, workflow, and aesthetic for the year. The gear we used, the sonic decisions we made, the mistakes we embraced, and the textures we love.

The Emulator:

Our long awaited deep dive into the E-mu Emulator II finally happened - and it might be our most character-driven synth project yet. A classic 8-bit sampler with juicy analog filters, we set out to capture not only our favorite ’80s presets, but also the chaotic one-shots, uneven mappings, and downright strange looping that defined the early days of sampling. We kept the quirks intact, because that’s where the magic lives. If the SP-1200 was raw attitude, the Emulator is its cinematic, emotional brother. You can read more about the Emulator from Mars here. 

Vinyl Breaks

Our best-selling release of the year - and our most in-depth acoustic drum sampling project to date. We worked with four incredible drummers across a wide range of kits, creating loops that were pressed the sessions to vinyl, and re-sampled. The result: royalty-free loops that knock like the rare records you've always wanted to sample. From funk to boom-bap, disco to DnB, it’s all in there: gritty, human, and full of life.

You can read more about the sampling process here.

Vinyl SP From Mars

Another huge hit of the year, Vinyl SP combines the iconic SP-1200 sampler with our favorite recording medium. From acoustic drums to drum machines and melodic elements like Wurlitzer, guitar, and bass, we ran hundreds of one-shots through the SP, re-pitching, pressing to vinyl, and re-sampling the results - it was quite the journey each sound went through! Dusty, loud and harmonically rich - this pack is a go-to for anyone chasing real SP texture without the headaches of vintage hardware (our SP caught on fire once 😭). You can read more about the process here. 

Perkons From Mars

The Erica Synths Perkons HD-01 is a modern hybrid drum machine - punchy, dirty, and full of movement, due to its automation capabilities that make it come alive in a way few machines can. Focusing on both loops and one hits, we sampled each voice through filters, saturators and EQs to create something powerful and unpredictable. Perfect for techno, experimental, or industrial grooves. Read more about our sampling process and hear the demos here.

808 Loops From Mars 

The 808 is a classic for a reason, and we've been jamming so hard on our 909 Loops that we'd been dying to create the ultimate 808 loops collection - and I think we accomplished that! I use a lot of our loops when composing music and was really missing the 808 - so this was a bit of a personal mission :) 

Composing, layering, and manipulating classic 808 tones into evolving, playable grooves, long-form loops are always the truest representation of the machine (compared to the more flexible but canned sounding one-shots). These are club-oriented beats, broken down into individual parts, recorded cleanly but also through a huge range of analog gear. 

Read more about our sampling process here.

Indie Tapes From Mars

Our wildcard of the year and our most musical and artistic - the closest thing to creating a record. Built from dusty cassette recordings, reel-to-reel jams, and home studio takes - edited, processed, and turned into a library of analog textures and found sounds. There are pianos through tape echoes, guitars layered with room bleed, bass runs printed onto cassettes, and field recordings melted into noise beds. It feels like making a record - not a sample pack. A lo-fi, bedroom pop toolkit. Read more about Indie Tapes here.

The Takeaway

This year was the most artistically fulfilling and collaborative for our team at SFM and I think that shines through on all of our work. Whether we were re-visiting classics or trying completely new things, it was all about having fun, being inspired, and chasing character over perfection. 

Thanks for supporting us, downloading our packs, and sharing what you’ve made. And if 2025 isn't enough stuff,  you can always get the everything bundle 😉).