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Creating Breakbeats From Scratch

Level: Advanced
Posted: 05.10.07

All too often we can get into a pattern of recycling and using the same old tried and tested breaks. While there is nothing wrong with this, and I for one never want to hear the Amen Break die out, it's always nice to try out new ideas and techniques within your own music. I came across this little way of working a few years back, basically creating my own breaks from GM type drum kits, and turning these into fairly authentic breaks, so I will endeavor to break down this process.

1) Choosing the right Drum Kit

For this to really work I've found you need to use very live sounding kits, and not anything too electronic sounding. You also need a neatly layed out kit with all the sounds you would expect, kick, snare, ride, crash etc, hence why I have opted for the GM type kits. For this example I am going to use a kit that comes as part of the Logic sound library and I have loaded it into the EXS sampler.

2) Creating a pattern

So I am going to start off with a simple 2 step type pattern, using the best live sounding kick and snare from within the kit and a tight steady hi hat keeping it all together. Now don't worry that the kick and snare sound weak, if you think about all the classic breaks they dont have that phat sound out of the box, we achieve this by layering our own synthetic drum hits over the top. Next step is to add some ghost snares between the groove, try fiddling around with the off beats, maybe put a ghost kick just before the 1st main snare. Again don't worry about the sound, worry about the groove!

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3) All about the rides!

A lot of the breaks that have the most power contain upfront ride cymbals, think about the amen for example. It doesn't sound like a ride cymbal to our ears because its been pitched up many times since the original recording and the rides are heavily compressed, but it is the cymbals that essentially give it its power. So you can start off by programming a ride for the length of every beat, so 4 rides in a bar. Also try moving around maybe one of the rides to an off beat to change the feel – there are no right or wrong ways as long as it sounds good to your ear.

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4) Additional Percussion

So we need to fill the beat out even more, my next logical choice would be some sort tamb or shaker percussion. You can add these playing 16th notes, and you could try a open hi hat at the end of the bar. Programming congas and bongo patterns will start giving the break its own character.

5) Plug in Processing

So the beat will still sound very dry and clean/digital sounding at the moment, so we need to dirty things up alot! First thing we need to do is add compression to all of the drums as a whole. You need to remember that all the old breaks we are using are from the days when close mic'ing of the drums wasnt possible, it was usually just a pair of overhead mics capturing the whole performance. This would then be compressed to glue the sound together, not too mention the engineers would slam the tape machines hot too, so you would get natural tape saturation/compression. I am going to use Logic's built in compressor for this, with a quite high threshold and a ratio of around 1:16. I want a zero attack and will I fiddle around with the release time until i get something i'm happy with. This should now glue the rides and the kick & snare all together, and should generally sound alot more thrashy!

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6) Distortion

Now time to take that clinical digital sound away! I am using Logic's Guitar Amp pro, which models various types of amp distortion. FIddle round with different presets and then tweak from there, you dont want to destroy the beat, but just take away its shiny digital sound.

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7) Exporting

Try now exporting the break at different pitches, so try it will all the drums pitched down, you may get a better feel, or if you want it more hyper sounding you can pitch up, remember all the classic breaks are drastically faster than their originals! Export the audio and save it for another day, as now its just raw audio we can chop it up and edit it just like any other break! Your own VIP breaks!

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