We introduce and study a natural variant of matroid amalgams. For matroids and with , we define a splice of and to be a matroid on with and . We show that splices exist for each such pair of matroids and ; furthermore, there is a freest splice of and , which we call the free splice. We characterize when a matroid is the free splice of and . We study minors of free splices and the interaction between free splice and several other matroid operations. Although free splice is not an associative operation, we prove a weakened counterpart of associativity that holds in general and we characterize the triples for which associativity holds. We also study free splice as it relates to various classes of matroids.