Sample From Mars Vinyl Drums from Mars MPC Expansion

Acoustic Drums & Percussion Cut To Vinyl and Sampled
Vinyl Drums From Mars is a collection of acoustic drum and percussion one hits created from scratch, cut to vinyl and sampled. Our most epic project to date, this pack is a love letter to the art of sampling, and pays tribute to the classic and irresistible sound of drums sampled off of vinyl. You'll get everything from clean, dead and dry, classic vinyl drums, to dusty and degraded, dirty and effected, and completely unexpected sounds....

The Sound of Vinyl
Drums sampled off of vinyl changed the landscape of music forever after - laying the groundwork for hip hop, house and countless other sample-based music styles. It's true that the sound of vinyl can bring many benefits - it can harden a funk snare into a hip hop hit, add dust, flavor, and lovely noise which allows drums to cut through a mix. Like tape, it's a medium that can just make things sound "better".

But unfortunately, sampling vinyl comes with many drawbacks. Often in a piece of music, you're limited to just one or two isolated drum hits (good luck finding cymbals) that probably don't fully decay before another element comes in. That open snare you found probably had other tracks playing on top of it which increased the noise floor (admittedly cool sometimes).

Recording the Source Material
Our goal was to capture the magic of vinyl drum one hits without being constrained by these limitations. We chose to create a record of only acoustic sounds, because it allowed us to sculpt everything from scratch, physically, by tuning drums, hitting them certain ways, and capturing everything through mics to tape, thus achieving the highest possible quality and image. We also love the idea of constraints: How can we create a diverse vinyl library from only our in-house drums and percussion?

Our vintage late 1960s Rogers kit (20” kick, 16” floor tom, 13” rack tom) is one of the best sounding drum kits we've ever heard. It sounds punchy and tight, and has a huge amount of character. (Hey, we did try 8 drum kits before buying it!).

Being inspired by funk records and the people who sampled them, we knew the Rogers was ideal. First, we multi-sampled the kit cleanly, as it'd be played in a session (letting the drums ring off each other), using an array of vintage and modern microphones, tracking through tube preamps, into our API 1608, to tape, and finally the computer.

We took the bottom heads off of the kick and toms to get the purest fundamental tone, mic'ing it from underneath with dynamic mics for the main body of the sound, and then blending that with an overhead condenser, for the tone of the drum. Mic'ing the inside of the drum gives us maximum isolation from the top of the toms, which allows the overhead to blend seamlessly (no phasing or overlapping frequencies).

Then, we captured all of the percussion in our studio to complete the transcription of our in-house setup. This included all types of shakers, 2 tambourines, 2 cowbells, 2 woodblocks, 3 claves, a triangle, sticks, snaps, and claps, tracked with a vintage MD421, U87, and a Coles 4038.