3/28/19

ACO2015 Technology of
Music and Audio

Breakbeats – 6-10 Seconds of Music

That Spawned Whole New Genres

Dr. Robert Bell

College of Arts and Education
Victoria University

DRUM BREAKS
• Section of a jazz, soul, RnB or funk
song where the drummer solos on a
beat, hence the ‘drum break’
• Two pivotal breaks:

• The ‘Amen Break’: Amen, Brother by

the Winstons, 1969
– Definition of the breakbeat and example of
Amen Break from Jason Hockman (1’08” to
3’30”) https://youtu.be/eJf9Jptq7VY

• Funky Drummer – Clyde Stubblefield,

Jabo Starks (James Brown band), 1969
– Examples of Funky Drummer in various
tracks: https://youtu.be/H0f9gp6w6bw

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MORE BREAKS - HONOURABLE MENTIONS

• Apache by the Shadows (1960) – cover version by the
Incredible Bongo Band (1973)
– https://youtu.be/WY-Z6wm6TMQ
– Sampled over 500 times:
– https://www.whosampled.com/Incredible-Bongo-Band/Apache/sampled/
• Stratus by Billy Cobham (1973) and Good Old Music by
Funkadelic (1970) used by Massive Attack in Safe From
Harm (1991)
– https://www.whosampled.com/sample/20/Massive-Attack-Safe-From-
Harm-Billy-Cobham-Stratus/
– https://www.whosampled.com/sample/3923/Massive-Attack-Safe-From-
Harm-Funkadelic-Good-Old-Music/
• Them Changes by Bernard Purdie (1972) used by The
Chemical Brothers in Block Rockin’ Beats (1997)
– https://www.whosampled.com/sample/30264/The-Chemical-Brothers-
Block-Rockin%27-Beats-Bernard-Purdie-Changes/

DJS, HIP HOP AND TURNTABLISM

DJ Kool Herc playing at the first ever DJ Grand Wizard Theodore,

bloc party, Bronx, NY, c. 1973 Inventor of the ‘scratch’ technique
• Early hip hop DJs played repetitive records with funk, soul,
African and Latin beats/grooves for rappers to rhyme and
freestyle over at block parties
• DJs exploited the limited technology of the turntable to produce
new performance techniques and sounds
• Using two copies of a record, multiple turntables and a mixer,
breaks could be played non-stop like an endless loop

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GRANDMASTER FLASH: THE ‘GET DOWN’

• Grandmaster Flash pioneered many
extended turntablism and mixing
techniques in the 1970s and 80s
• Credited with inventing punch phrasing
(inserting short phrases like horn stabs from
one record over the beats of another record)
• Claims to have invented the ‘get down’
• Without picking up the tonal arm of the record player, and instead
placing his fingers on the vinyl to gauge a record’s revolutions, Flash
was able to identify a ten-second drum beat that he would
manually edit from one drum solo to another, across songs and
genres — extending the beat, so that eventually an MC could rap
over it…“I came up with a system to manually take a drum break…
to take duplicate copies of a record and seamlessly take ten seconds
and make it ten minutes.” (Fernandes, M 2016)
• Grandmaster Flash live https://youtu.be/pCMELzwBt-g

PITCH CONTROL VIA TURNTABLES

UP:
FASTER TEMPO
HIGHER PITCH
BRIGHTER TONE

DOWN:
SLOWER TEMPO
LOWER PITCH
DARKER TONE

• The pitch control on a turntable was also used to

creative effect
• Beatmix, tempo match, tempo and pitch change
• Whole genres of music were built on the concept of
shifting the pitch and speed of the drum break

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SAMPLING CHANGES
THE MUSIC WORLD FOREVER
• 1979 – Fairlight Computer Music
Instrument (CMI)
• An Australian invention, the Fairlight
revolutionised music production
• First device able to digitally record small
segments (i.e. samples) of any sound,
process them in a computer, play them
on a keyboard and arrange them with a
sequencer
• Limited recording time and prohibitively
expensive: $21K RRP = $64K in 2019
• Early adopters include Kate Bush, Peter
Gabriel, Hans Zimmer, Herbie Hancock
Kate Bush – Never Forever
and Stevie Wonder First commercial album to use
Fairlight CMI 1980

1980s: SAMPLERS BECOME AFFORDABLE

• 1980s samplers enabled the recording and playback of audio
samples using MIDI keyboards and sequencers
• Also able to shape sounds using MIDI and synth processing
techniques like pitch bend, modulation, envelope, LFO etc.
• Reduced cost of memory and processors opened up
samplers to everyday musicians

Ensoniq Mirage™ c.1985 E-mu Systems Emulator II c.1984

128kb RAM, 3 samples at a time, Included a MIDI sequencer and
8 notes at a time US$1700 analog synth controls
First ‘budget’ sampler

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HIP HOP GOES DIGITAL

• In 1988 Roger Linn and Akai partner to develop the MPC60
• A hybrid of the Linn 9000 drum machine and S900 sampler
• The MPC becomes the #1 Hip Hop and RnB workstation for
decades, and is still used by artists today for its feel and sound

Kanye West

Akai S900 c.1986.

Akai MPC60 c.1988

Linn 9000 c.1984 Sampling ‘brain’ of the S900 Mark Ronson
First digital sampling drum machine Pattern sequencing of the Linn 9000

BREAKBEATS GET MANGLED

• Musicians discovered that with samplers, the drum
breaks could be transformed beyond just playing and
repeating
• Three particularly important processes:
1. Transposition: playing breaks up and down the MIDI
keyboard produces changes in pitch and tempo
– Note up = faster loop at higher pitch
– JUNGLE, HARDCORE, DRUM & BASS
• Gleams by Bert H, Chantelle (2019): https://youtu.be/O8LkaO1VB9U

– Note down = slower loop at lower pitch

– HIP HOP, TRIP HOP
• Gorecki by Lamb (1997): https://youtu.be/tSRYvYN1ayw?t=66

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BREAKBEATS GET MANGLED

1. Transposition

Samples being transposed up and down a range of MIDI notes in Logic’s EXS24 sampler

BREAKBEATS GET MANGLED

2. Multisampling: Slicing up drum loops into single
hits and assigning each to a MIDI note

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BREAKBEATS GET MANGLED

3. Resequencing: then playing those notes in
different orders/sequences to create new rhythms
and patterns out of the original loops