VINYL BREAKS FROM MARS

Acoustic Drum & Percussion Breaks Pressed to Vinyl

Vinyl Breaks From Mars is a collection of 200 royalty free, acoustic breakbeats pressed to vinyl and sampled. Featuring everything from classic funk to 70s disco, boom-bap hip hop and explosive drum n' bass, this is our tribute to those collections of iconic breaks we all want to use but don’t own the rights to.

Featuring 4 of our favorite drummers from around the world, and a variety of kits and mics, Vinyl Breaks is our most diverse offering of acoustic drum loops to date. Pop these beats into your productions to get an undeniably live groove, coupled with the incredible sound of vinyl!

The Power Of the Break

What began as fleeting drum solos on funk records has become a permanent backbone of contemporary music production. Decades later, breakbeats remain one of the most sampled and reimagined elements in music, bridging the energy of live drumming with the endless possibilities of modern production. Making our own royalty free breaks has been a long standing goal, and of course we couldn't resist pressing them all to our favorite medium - vinyl! 

The Drummers are the Foundation

The first step in this journey was giving in to the fact that producing drummers remotely would get us the best results! The break is all about the groove, and the groove comes from the performance, which is determined not just by the drummer, but how comfortable they are while recording. So it made perfect sense to call on some of our favorite drummers (who also double as extremely talented engineers) to record everything themselves - in their studio, with their kit and mics, at their own pace. 

I shared playlists of reference songs with each drummer, and they set up their kit and mics accordingly. By sending back their own two track mix, plus the unprocessed stems, we had everything we needed to either keep their original sound or modify it completely!

Capturing up to 8 bar loops, we were emphatic about preserving each drummer's natural pocket and feel, applying very little timing correction and editing. And no samples allowed!

We re-created some classics:

And made new stuff, too:

Meet the Drummers

Each player brought a completely different sound to the mix. Timon is the heart and soul of the classic funk and disco breaks - but with a deep, more modern kick sound. He tracked a lot of amazing percussion, too - check out these congas!

And since I love disco - 

Marcin, on the other hand, has a more laid back, almost Dilla-esc, hip hop sound. Sonically speaking, he's very Samples From Mars - colored, vintage and somewhat lo-fi. Marcin was actually our first employee and contributed drums to our Indie Tapes pack. 

Simone is a super clean and precise drummer who I found on Instagram. I shared some references with him, and he gave me back unprocessed stems. I went crazy processing these with hardware, recording them to tape, and then slowing them down on the degraded vinyl: 

Finally, there's Daniel Fasano, an insanely technical yet groovy drummer with a thick and aggressive sound. We weren't even planning on doing any drum n' bass beats, but his were so killer we just had to include them: 

Cutting The Vinyl

Once all of the beats were in, we cut two 12" acetate records (also known as test pressings). Then, we popped the records on our turntable and sampled them, cleanly, with our Ortofon 2M red through our amazing Alpha Recording Systems, and also in parallel, through a chain of vintage compressors and saturators, to tape. Finally, we ran the turntable at various speeds, capturing slower and faster versions of breaks with a Shure M44-7 cartridge for that classic, loud DJ sound. 

What You Get

The result: A vintage sounding library of 200 vinyl breaks - 150 drum beats and 50 percussion-only grooves. From classic funk to proper disco, soul, r&b, hip hop and drum n' bass, the breaks range from clean and tight to downright dusty, distorted, re-pitched and compressed.

You'll find there's a nice combination of more complex beats, but also perfectly simple (and super useable) versions -any grooves with percussion also have a non-percussion version - and all of the disco beats have alternate, snare-less versions 🕺🏻.

So if you want the undeniable groove only the best drummers can provide, paired with the classic crunch of vinyl, Vinyl Breaks is sure to be a new staple in your digital crate.