Lesson 3 - Getting Started on the Break

So, here we are, ready to get started on that crazy breakbeat. The break is going to provide the driving force and energy behind the song, and is perhaps the single most important part of a Breakcore track. The techniques we're going to be using to create it hark back to the days of hardware samplers, such as the Akai MPC2000. In the early days of Jungle and DnB, these provided a way to cut up and rearrange samples of beats from records, and it was a lengthy and time consuming process. Fortunately, nowadays a break can be created in a relatively short time using your DAW. In this lesson, and all the subsequent lessons, I'll be using Ableton Live, but the methods used are applicable to just about any DAW you might have. Where possible, I'll briefly discuss the differences in how each DAW achieves a given technique.

Step 1 - Selecting the Break.

A break beat is essentially a small snippet of a song, usually a drum solo that can be sampled out, rearranged, sped up, mashed up with FX or have just about any process you can dream of applied to it. Many of the more famous Breaks are sampled from old soul and funk records; James Brown records are a particularly popular source of Breaks, although anywhere you can get a snippet of a funky drum solo should suit you fine. The most famous and most used Break comes from a relatively obscure B-side by The Winstons, from the song Amen Brother. It is commonly reffered to as 'The Amen Break'. This is the break I'm going to be using in this example, and I would reccomend any budding Breakcore producer familiarise themselves with it, it is the bread and butter of many Breakcore artists. This break can be downloaded from many sample sites, though a good place to start would be www.junglebreaks.co.uk This site has many Breaks as well as the name of the song it was taken from, and examples of songs it has been used in. I would also reccomend getting a copy of Amen Brother so as to hear it in context, it's a damn funky song and well worth a listen.

So now we have a Break, where to from here? The first thing you'll want to do is get a good loop going. You will notice that the first and last bars of the Amen Break still have some of the orchestration in them, so we probably want to avoid those. To get a nice tight loop, you want to start on the first beat of the second bar (the kick drum) and end nicely just before the third bar kicks in. This takes a bit of practice, and is all about using your ears to determine when it is looping smoothly. In Ableton, this is usually quite easy, given its automatic tempo definition and looping abilities. This is reffered to as 'Warping'. In Cubase, the 'Time Stretch' feature will help you to tighten up your loop and adjust your tempo. Sticking with Ableton for the minute, you may have to adjust your warp markers a little to ensure the loop starts and ends in the right places, as shown in the screenshot. There are plenty of good guides on the internet about how to use warp markers, so unless I get a lot of requests, I'm not going to get into that too deeply here. Suffice to say that a lot of breaks will loop with 95% accurracy from the off with Ableton. Now we have our Break looping nicely, it's time to start having some fun with it.

Step 2 - Isolating the Hits.

Before we start mangling our beats crazy style, it's a good idea to separate out the parts of the loop onto different tracks, so that they can be processed independantly. For the Amen Break, I'm going to split my loop across three tracks, one for the kick drum, one for the snare drum, and one for the hi-hats and cymbals. This will allow me to give them a bit more character and definition later in the mix, for example, I might want to put a little distortion on the kick drum to fatten it up a bit. By selecting the hits so they go yellow, I can drag them around onto different tracks cut and paste style. This is a nice quick way to do it, and one of the reasons I prefer Ableton for quickly editing a beat. Users of other DAW's may need to go for the more traditional approach of selecting a beat, then cutting and pasting it across other tracks. As a simple rule of thumb, kick drums tend to look medium height in the waveform, and quite thick, while snare drums have a very high bit at the start of the wave which tails off in a long triangle. Hi-hats look like smaller versions of the snare drum, and are often grouped in small, busy sections. I'm going to seperate out these three main types of beats before I go further into processing them. Once we've got the parts spread across our tracks we can start to have some fun.

Step 3 - Rearranging the Break.

Now comes the really good bit, taking that beat and creating our own, unique, crazy break with it. And better still, this is really, really easy. All were going to do is change the order of the beats across our track. Start by copying your loop to make four bars. Now cut out a couple of those hi-hats and copy and paste the snare to fill in the gaps you've left. Starting to hear it? Try the same with the kick drum so that it has two kicks at the start of the bar. Sounds pretty good doesn't it. You'll want to have some fun experimenting here, so copy and paste parts all over the place to make that toe-tapping Breakbeat come alive. A useful tip to remember is that in DnB, the kick is on the first beat, and the snares are one the 2nd and 4th beat. If you keep to roughly that structure, you're already winning.