About us

Our mission is to bring to your fingertips unique and underrepresented instruments from around the world

During my first 20 years of collecting instruments, I learned the craft of sampling from some of Hollywood’s finest. I got to practice my craft at legendary studios, shoulder to shoulder with the best musicians, engineers, and producers in the world.

The next logical step was to bring all that knowledge to my own studio and apply it to create Saturn Samples.

Expressiveness, quality, and attention to detail are at the core of our processes. We want to share how we make our instruments, so you can be sure they are bringing real production value to your projects.

  • Our experience comes from over a dacade of working in the virtual instrument world. From small studio projects to full orchestra sampling sessions at Fox or Sony scoring stages, we’ve seen it all, and have the right approach for every instrument we tackle.

  • In the audio-world, there are lots of automatable processes: batch edits, denoising, normalizing.

    But with 10+ years of experience making virtual instruments, I know the expressiveness and muscality lies in the testing and quality assurance that happens after all the automation is done.

    We are deeply commited to keep our most essential processes manual in order to provide that essential layer of human touch.

  • As long as I can, I will continue to search and record those unique sounds. It is very much an ongoing life project.

  • There are instruments out there either made by someone with vision, or instruments old as time that are fading in history. I intend to preserve their sound for the next generations. Access and awareness to this kind of instrument is a main goal in our project.

Hey there, thank you for your interest in our instruments.

What started with a personal collection around 40 acoustic and electronic instruments collected over 20 years, is now a growing catalog of unique, finely-sampled, expressive and inspiring musical instruments.

The kind of instruments we offer are normally an afterthought for larger developers, and end up as under-sampled instruments, or missing notable flagship features such as mic positions, round-robbins, multiple dynamic layers, etc.

We intend to provide fully featured, detailed, and expressive virtual instrument versions of these musical underdogs, bringing a whole new range of tones, color, and possibilities to your music.

I hope you have an inspiring journey!

Santiago Velarde

CEO & Founder