Utilising breaks

[Jubz]

Any tips on using breaks in tunes, stretching, chopping etc?

[auan]

Get the break sounding sweet BEFORE you chop. Apart from that...

Break chopping I'd call one of my strengths. What else are you looking for?

[__________]

always layer them.
don't be afraid to just chop out certain hits, some breaks have ill snares but shite kicks.
don't stretch them too much or you will lose a lot of quality.
if you are bored or uninspired, chop up some breaks and get them to sit nicely with each other. i find composing requires more inspiration, but doing rhythmical things like chopping breaks is fun all the time.
reverse drums are cool
classic breaks are cool
cut out individual hits from whole breaks and save them as separate wave files. make sure when you do this, you apply really small fades to the beginning and end of the hit to stop clicks.
combine breaks with single drum hits.
add noise to drum tracks, like vinyl crackle or processed white noise etc, to make the drums sit nicely together.

[Jubz]

Get the break sounding sweet BEFORE you chop. Apart from that...

Break chopping I'd call one of my strengths. What else are you looking for?

Well I'm a novice, aside from nicking hits and that to layer with other samples I haven't experimented much. Is it best to use breaks as close to the bpm your writing at? Although much great music has been made where this clearly isn't the case.

[auan]

Get the break sounding sweet BEFORE you chop. Apart from that...

Break chopping I'd call one of my strengths. What else are you looking for?

Well I'm a novice, aside from nicking hits and that to layer with other samples I haven't experimented much. Is it best to use breaks as close to the bpm your writing at? Although much great music has been made where this clearly isn't the case.

Doesn't matter. Hip-hop clearly does. Jungle clearly doesn't. All that is really essential is that you get the break to your working bpm somehow. Time-stretching or pitch-shifting, doesn't really matter (although Boxcutter does some great stuff where he'll take a break at jungle tempo but chop it to fit a dubstep tune, Tauhid off the first album, for example).

Actually, lemme google around and find the tutorials that were most useful to me. Frantik on DOA did a good one. So did some guy called Hatrixx or something on his own site. There's many, many different methods.

[addict]

if you use fruity, best thing IMO in that program is the slice tool: right click the break, open in slicer channel, then either take each sample out or mash it up in piano roll. i could spend days fucking with breaks in that way.

[relik]

if you use fruity, best thing IMO in that program is the slice tool: right click the break, open in slicer channel, then either take each sample out or mash it up in piano roll. i could spend days fucking with breaks in that way.

yes...the slicer is great for break edits. completely rewrite the break into your own patterns, make stutters, mess with pitch and velocity...etc.

if you're not editing them that way, use the clip tracks and slice, rearrange, copy, and stutter them up...throw automation clips on them etc. whatever you are more comfortable with in FL...both can achieve the same thing.

the easiest way to just get a break to work without doing jungle or breakcore style edits is to edit the whole break or part of a break first so that it loops perfectly, regardless of pitch. i'll always use original breaks, so that's what i do right off the bat. you'll eventually build a collection of your own break cuts so then you can just re-use them. it has to be cut exactly at the beginning and end and slightly fade the tails out if you want like someone else suggested. it just has to loop perfectly. then it's just a matter of time/pitch stretching it to work with the track you're putting it in. same thing as beat matching if you are a dj, so you can do it half time, same time, off beat....whatever...once you have the basics of preparing a break for usage, experiment and do what sounds good to you. just think if it as mixing records if my babble confuses you.

i use a bunch of classic breaks in my 140ish bpm tunes. just the love of the jungle. my production still really isn't where i want it to be though...but definitely progressed in the last year.

[serox]

Do you get these breakz from CD's? Other people have made them and you just nick bits, is that right?

[chunkie]

Do you get these breakz from CD's? Other people have made them and you just nick bits, is that right?

depends which break you're talking about if we go jungle/dnb then there are certain old funk breaks that damn near everyone uses - amen, scorpio, worm etc

i've got about a hundred in wav and rex formats, and they are outright bad ass!

[serox]

depends which break you're talking about if we go jungle/dnb then there are certain old funk breaks that damn near everyone uses - amen, scorpio, worm etc

i've got about a hundred in wav and rex formats, and they are outright bad ass!

ah right I see. So maybe I am wasted too much tiem trying to write breaks?:)

Well, I like trying to copy breaks (but always fail) and I am learning at the same time hehe

[wub]

Once you've got your break nailed, setup an 8 bar loop and record it

Now, record the same 8 bar loop at 200% speed

Then record it again at 50% speed.

Then chop and change the three loops together to create some glitched out combinations.

Rinse and repeat.....

[Jubz]

Get the break sounding sweet BEFORE you chop. Apart from that...

Break chopping I'd call one of my strengths. What else are you looking for?

Well I'm a novice, aside from nicking hits and that to layer with other samples I haven't experimented much. Is it best to use breaks as close to the bpm your writing at? Although much great music has been made where this clearly isn't the case.

Doesn't matter. Hip-hop clearly does. Jungle clearly doesn't. All that is really essential is that you get the break to your working bpm somehow. Time-stretching or pitch-shifting, doesn't really matter (although Boxcutter does some great stuff where he'll take a break at jungle tempo but chop it to fit a dubstep tune, Tauhid off the first album, for example).

Actually, lemme google around and find the tutorials that were most useful to me. Frantik on DOA did a good one. So did some guy called Hatrixx or something on his own site. There's many, many different methods.

Yeah man that would be good, safe for the advice.

[somejerk]

Get the break sounding sweet BEFORE you chop.

i always mean to do that but get caught up in the moment of adding a new element to the track. plus every track has differnet needs and things that need to be turned up or down, frequency wise, so it seems like that would be done after most parts have been assembled.

unless you just mean getting the break loud enough/compressed, say if you are using raw/unprocessed break stripped straight from the original track.

[Sharmaji]

recycle or phatmatik is your break-chopping friend.

[auan]

Get the break sounding sweet BEFORE you chop.

i always mean to do that but get caught up in the moment of adding a new element to the track. plus every track has differnet needs and things that need to be turned up or down, frequency wise, so it seems like that would be done after most parts have been assembled.

unless you just mean getting the break loud enough/compressed, say if you are using raw/unprocessed break stripped straight from the original track.

I mean get it sounding so that if you looped it, it would make a stand-up record on its own. The old breaks were recorded on old equipment (duh) and the fidelity wasn't great. Bring it up to date. It doesn't take much, just the usual EQ and compression, maybe something a little more creative like distortion. Once it's sounding sweet as, chop it up by whatever method and get programming. It saves CPU, because you're no longer running any processing on the dry break, and I think boosts your creativity in the editing, because you already know how the drums are going to sound in the finished track. Hard to explain, but it works.

And don't be afraid of getting really creative on the 'get it sounding good first' stage. Paradox makes a lot of tracks - Curse of Coincidence being the most obvious one - where he takes several deliberately badly treated versions of the same break and drops them in at different times. Breakage likes to take a good quality version of the break and drop in crazy versions on the fills, using things like bitcrushing, overcompression, comb filtering, you name it. Source Direct would do things like EQ one break so that there was too much hats, then take another with too much snare, another with too much kick, and layer different edits of them all into this 'wall of drums'.

Someone said in another thread that there hasn't been too much break work done in dubstep yet. I think they're right, but there are a few guys who've already nailed it, Boxcutter, Distance and Toasty Boy mainly, but I think dubstep's perfect for it, with the 140bpm tempo being closer to the original funk tempos. Problem is that funk breaks don't have the kind of over-the-top syncopation that makes garage-based music swing, and it's tempting to just make slowed-down dnb, but that's nothing some clever chopping can't fix, right?

[auan]

Get the break sounding sweet BEFORE you chop. Apart from that...

Break chopping I'd call one of my strengths. What else are you looking for?

Well I'm a novice, aside from nicking hits and that to layer with other samples I haven't experimented much. Is it best to use breaks as close to the bpm your writing at? Although much great music has been made where this clearly isn't the case.

Doesn't matter. Hip-hop clearly does. Jungle clearly doesn't. All that is really essential is that you get the break to your working bpm somehow. Time-stretching or pitch-shifting, doesn't really matter (although Boxcutter does some great stuff where he'll take a break at jungle tempo but chop it to fit a dubstep tune, Tauhid off the first album, for example).

Actually, lemme google around and find the tutorials that were most useful to me. Frantik on DOA did a good one. So did some guy called Hatrixx or something on his own site. There's many, many different methods.

Yeah man that would be good, safe for the advice.

Here's frantik's:
http://www.dogsonacid.com/showthread.ph ... did=118245

I like this one, it's quick and dirty. And if you're stuck for inspiration, you can just put random notes on every 8th (1 & 2 &...) and you'll have something. I used this one in Reason, because you can just stick the slices into Redrum and having to fuck about with any of the 'real' samplers.

Hatrixx's one is a little more refined, but his site seems to have disappeared. In fact the top google result for 'hatrixx breaks tutorial' is now this very thread

Basically, Hatrixx's method involved chopping everything from the main hits into a sample. Say you had a 2-step funk beat, like the Amen. You'd start your selection from the start of the first kick, and select everything up to the start of the first snare. Cut, paste, there's your first slice. Then take everything from the start of the first snare up to the start of the second kick - including all the little hats and ghost hits - cut, paste, second sample, and so on. Then just map the samples onto some keys and bash away.

Both of them are quick, compared to chopping Recycled slices, where you have to copy and drag loads of little notes (one every little fucking tiny hit in the break, arranged chromatically up the keyboard) around the piano roll. These methods let you just concentrate on the main hits, which can be both good or bad. You can get a solid beat down with just a handful of hits, but you're limited to the patterns already in the original break. For a beginner to breakbeat science like yourself, I'd say try these methods first, but don't rule out the really anal methods like Recycle/Phatmatik/Fruity Slicer. Sometimes they are a necessary evil. Of course, some of the drumfunk guys, especially those who post on Subvert Central, swear by these methods, or the next one.

There are those who prefer to chop up the raw audio, rather than bothering with MIDI and samplers. They literally just drop the break file into Cubase or Logic and start chopping with the scissors tool and copying and pasting. I can see the benefits of this. You can see the waveform as you're chopping, and you're not as restriced to the quantize grid as you are with MIDI. But it takes aaaaages to build a drum track this way, and there's the risk of RSI from all that Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V you'll be doing.

Then of course there's trackers. They really are tailor-made for chopping up loops, amongst other things. They give you Sample Offset, meaning that when you trigger a sample, you can set it to start from 256 evenly spaced points throughout the sample. So by starting a sample a quarter of the way through, you're triggering the first snare (obviously you can fine-tune it when the snare isn't perfectly on the beat). You can edit breaks in a tracker without ever having to cut up a waveform, and you can do all sorts of other nifty things like reverse the sample, retrigger it to make drum rolls, and so on.

More than one way to skin a cat...

[serox]

Never done this before but I think it I understand so will give it ago sometime this weekend!

Thanks in advanced.

[dem2ruff]

Easy well i would go about it like this :
01 - get out my old akai s950
02 - get out my old atari 1040st
03 - trawl through my original collection of breaks
04 - place the vinyl on the 1200 ( carefully )
05 - Record in s950 /then chop/asign to keys
06 - eq on my desk then route to cubase ( In As Audio )
07 - then vibe out with the beatz
works every time get some fattness in them drumz tho
being an ol junglist it comes easy the skill to it is in the chop up if u chop proper ya beats sound sharp then get ur basic rift rollin the like i said b4 just vibe with ya track
thats what Id do anyways probly no help to anyone jus me ramblin on

[shonky]

Both of them are quick, compared to chopping Recycled slices, where you have to copy and drag loads of little notes (one every little fucking tiny hit in the break, arranged chromatically up the keyboard) around the piano roll. These methods let you just concentrate on the main hits, which can be both good or bad. You can get a solid beat down with just a handful of hits, but you're limited to the patterns already in the original break. For a beginner to breakbeat science like yourself, I'd say try these methods first, but don't rule out the really anal methods like Recycle/Phatmatik/Fruity Slicer. Sometimes they are a necessary evil. Of course, some of the drumfunk guys, especially those who post on Subvert Central, swear by these methods, or the next one.

Got to be recycle for me (make sure the cuts are exactly where you want them though, it's not always that exact). I then chop that up in the piano roll editor to get the basic beat I want (could be anything from a 4-bar to 8-bar loop), then resample that, stick it through recycle again and then just do little edits to the drums in there. This way you get the drums playing your rearranged loop which makes it easier to see what's going on in the piano roll editor.

If recycle's having trouble, switch the break to mono in your sample editor and then apply tiny fades between the drum hits (especially useful if there are lots of rides that play over the other hits to keep things separate). This should help recycle pick up the start points and with any luck should leave you with a cleaner break.

[corpsey]

Auan posting some interesting stuff in here.

Just to check- Reason is shite for chopping up/using breaks isn't it? Or is that just me being shite