we're gonna talk about break beats and sampling. Um, it's similar in theory, Teoh Just drum programming on a grid of But we're doing it with basically samples of a whole drum section from another record that, you know, we took and are cutting upto using our own track. Um, this really forms the foundation of a lot of hip hop and, like break beat on duh jungle drum a bass trip. Hop like a lot of different genres of music or really based around this, um, not all hip hop, of course, but like certainly, you know, strains of hip hop. Um, just like classic drum machines, there are a lot of different, like break beats that you hear over and over again in records. We, uh, don't want to get sued by, like, 40 different parties, so we're not going to be working with all of them today. But there's like, you know, the men break from Amend Brother by the wind stones and ah, lot of James Brown records like, you know, funky drug drummer and soul pride. Think by Lyn Collins, which is like the break that...

you hear in Like it takes two by Rob Base and DJ E Z Rock. There's ah version of Apache by Michael Viner is incredible Bongo band that you hear that break beat a lot. There's just a lot of different records, a lot of meters records that you know, mostly like solar funk records from the sixties and seventies that have this little drum brake in the middle where all the instruments drop out except for the drummer. And he does something cool and people have taken it, looped it, played with it in different ways. Toe be the backing beat for their own record. So, um, the way to kind of get these things you can go hunt down the record and record them from vinyl. Sometimes that's costly. Sometimes it's, you know, pain in the neck. I think if you're gonna be sampling anything from vinyl, you'd really need a good turntable, a good stylist and cartridge and a good phono pre EMP to record into your computer with. I use the techniques SL 1200 with a turntable with an order phone, Concord Contra cartridge, and I used the rain cerrado SL four box as my phono pre empt when I record, I think the early cerrado boxes like the S L one and SL two don't have very good phono pre amps. A lot of DJs have, like the Pioneer DJM 800 or mixers. I don't think the pre amps and those are very good. I think Allen and Heath makes really good products for recording vinyl. I think rain makes some pretty good mixers, or you can buy like some fancy nerdy like tube phono pre AMP the, uh, But regardless, you know, if you're trying to record vinyl into your computer to get sound quality that you can use in a professional recording, you're looking at over $1000 start up costs just for the equipment. So it easier Way is probably to find those songs on a CD, rip him from a CD or, you know you can go under the murky waters of the Internet and try your luck. And you know, I think you really need a wave file or in a I f f. I think having some you know, 1 28 k MP three that you bought off ITunes is not going to be high quality enough on dumb. It's really important to have, like the best quality source recording, just like with the drum samples. If you have ah, really great break beat and it just sounds like mud because it's recorded poorly. There's not a way to fix that or toe undo that with a factory. Q. Really? Um, you can do a little bit of damage control, but it's never gonna be as good as if you just have a really good hot recording of it straight away. Um, so we're going to talk a little bit about, like, file prep for this. Um, in the old days, you'd have an actual hardware sampler. You record something off a record into the sampler, and then, you know, let's say that your break beat is 100 beats per minute and you're making a song at 120. You'd make it go faster until it was 120 accordingly, like the pitch would go up because you're just playing the sample faster. And so it could sound kind of like Chip monkey, you know, like a little, uh, you know, just sped up or slowed down, which we don't really have to do anymore because we have like time stretching with computers where basically, let's say you have ah, sample. That's 10 seconds long. It cuts it up into, you know, 100,000 different parts and says, Okay, this is 100 beast print. I wanted to be 1 20 I'm gonna pull out enough of these little bits. You know, enough of these samples out of this file toe where the length of it is shortened, but the pitches and altered and they have different algorithms for figuring out what to pull out to make it sound truest toe what it used to toe what it originally waas, but just a different tempo. Um, that's really awesome. It is, you know, really easy. Um, but like pitching it up or pitching it down, doing it the old fashioned way Sometimes that's cool. If you want that effect. You know, if you if you're trying to sound like a jungle record from 1994 before time stretching was widely available, you know all those they were recording into a sampler and speeding it up the old fashioned way. So you can kind of go with either approach. I have right here a break beat. Um it's a 127 beats per minute. So if you were to slow that down to about you know, 100 or whatever, you can hear how it sounds slower or another way you can do it in your audio editor on this audio editor I'm using is Sony Sound Forge. But you can. I mean, there's so many different audio editors, and also you can do a lot of this inside most Dawes. I just really like the time stretching in this program. So I tell it that my tempo is 1 27 and I want to bring it down to and it could. It'll let me preview it. You can also change the pitch here. So now we have it at that 100 beats per minute, but it hasn't changed the pitch of it. Of course, you can change the pitch of that, and sometimes you can, like, change the pitch really drastically to get like, a different kind of interesting effect. That wouldn't be the main beat of your record, but might be interesting for, like, some sort of transition or something. Um, so you know, you can basically, you know, take a break beat, determine what the tempo is and and fit it to how you want to work with it. Um, that away if you open it up in a dog. Ah, lot of I said, most programs at this point will automatically determine what the tempo is and try and do their own time stretching to it. Um, it really depends on how much you like the algorithm they use.

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Chrissy

Chrissy is a genre-bending DJ/producer with productions on esteemed labels like File Under Disco, Tugboat Edits, Hypercolour, Classic, and on his weekly “Year Of Edits” blog. He co-runs The Nite Owl Diner label with Alex Burkat, and is a resident

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Breakbeats and Sampling

Breakbeats and Sampling

Lesson Info

7. Breakbeats and Sampling

Lessons

Classic Drum Machine Sounds

Mapping Drum Sounds in Kontakt

Mapping Drum Sounds in Ableton

Drum Programming in Grid Mode in Sony Acid

Drum Programming in Clip View in Ableton

The Synth as a Drum Machine