Samples From Mars has released Free SP From Mars, a free collection of gritty drum hits captured from the legendary E-mu SP-1200 drum sampler.
Free SP From Mars provides just a small taste of the sounds included in the commercial SP 1200 From Mars release (priced at $29 with over 1,500 samples), however it contains more than enough high quality drum and synth one shots to be worth the download. The freebie pack contains 201 samples in total, 65 of which are drum sounds and 136 of which are multi-sampled Korg Polysix, Roland Juno 60 and Yamaha DX100 patches that were resampled from the SP-1200 (the classic FM bass patch from the Yamaha DX100 sounds particularly nice). The drum sounds come from a variety of drum machines such as the Roland TR-808, TR-707, Linndrum, etc. Of course, all included sounds were first sampled to the E-Mu SP-1200 and then resampled to WAV.
See also: Free MFB-522 Drum Sample Pack By Samplefino!Apart from the WAV samples, the freebie kit also includes a set of NI Kontakt, Ableton Live and Logic Pro X patches. The Kontakt patches are very simple, without any additional controls or a customized user interface, but it’s still better than having to map the samples by hand in the patch editor.
Overall, the included samples sound very good and they really capture that gritty SP-1200 character. Being a 12-bit sampler, SP-1200 (and similar hardware samplers such as the AKAI MPC60, Korg DSS-1 and others) makes the drums sound crunchier and generally more interesting than what you get with modern high quality samplers. Of course, you can achieve a somewhat similar result by passing your drums through a bitcrusher set to 12-bit depth, but it’s not quite the same as recording the sounds from the actual hardware unit.
The samples are completely free to download and use, however you will need a valid email address in order to receive the download link. By downloading the freebie pack, you are also subscribing to the Samples From Mars mailing list.
Download
Free SP From Mars is available for free download via Samples From Mars (174 MB download size, ZIP archive, contains 201 audio samples in 24-bit WAV format, patches for Ableton Live, NI Kontakt and Logic Pro X).
