Tape Fragments From Mars

[Guy Rowland]

This looks fun for $9, and I love the sounds in this video from Samples From Mars:

We sampled an Oberheim synth a few years ago, and Nico made a beautiful demo for it using the samples. In fact, I loved it so much that I wanted to experiment further with it - so I ran bits and pieces of the demo out into an Echoplex, and an Otari reel to reel (that spirals into white noise, from the tape hiss), and then sent the returns of those tracks on the API back into the tape machines (via Aux send), creating feedback loops. I then took those feedback loops and put them back through the tape machines again!

I loved the sound of this and wanted to get a few more sounds, so I dipped into a music session (also made with Nico) that used the Polysix synth, and sent that through the same feedback loops. In the process, I stumbled on some random artifacts from previous takes on the tape, like reversed drums, and decided to include those as well.

https://samplesfrommars.com/products/ta ... -from-mars

But you know it makes me want to experiment more with my UAD EP-34 tape echo, mapping the variable pitch to a controller.

[Lawrence]

That’s a nice demo, but if you told me it was Omni run through an Echoplex emulation, I’d nod.

[Guy Rowland]

That’s a nice demo, but if you told me it was Omni run through an Echoplex emulation, I’d nod.

Agreed, which makes me want to do exactly that! I'll hopefully have a bit of time later today for a play around.

[Guy Rowland]

The results of the jury....

I can't get exactly the same effect using my UAD LP34, but it's pretty close. Movements that are too quick tend to have an over-aggressive attack, in general it's hard to get those very fast but unobtrusive flutters using this. But slightly slower movements work very nicely.

For the grand cost of £5.50 I thought I'd see how Samples From Mars' samples turned out (what a devil-may-care way to end my financial year). Some lovely sounds, but in most cases the stretched sample effect really hurts it - there's typically a cyclic element to the sound that speeds up and down with the key pitch, a really ugly effect. The better news is that because these are ordinary Kontakt patches, I can switch the stretch algorithm from Sampler to Time Machine Pro, and lo and behold the cycles now stay in sync. No idea why they don't default to Sampler, but good to know there's a workaround to make use of some of the lovely patches.