Playing with breakbeats
1) The first, and most obvious thing you can do with a breakbeat is to loop it without changing anything, or with only very minimal changes. Below, I’ve quantized the break slightly by placing the downbeat of each bar on the grid, but otherwise leaving things untouched in order to preserve some of the “live” feel. You can see this visually by looking at beats 2 and 4—you can see the snare is hitting behind beat.
2) There are several ways that you can alter the sound of the break. The first is to change the playback speed. A faster playback speed raises the pitch (unless you’re using software that can time stretch a sample without the pitch shift), while a slower playback speed lowers the pitch.
Here’s the original version of Impeach the President, recorded at approximately 94 bpm.
Here it is slowed down to 89 bpm—notice how it’s slightly lower in pitch.
Here it is at 89 bpm (and at the lower pitch) in Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic (Intro).” Although the sample has been processed (listen especially to how that snare rings out in Dre’s track), it’s still coming from “Impeach the President.”
3) You can maintain the original playback speed and pitch (transpose) the sample up or down. Below, I’ve pitched the sample up 18 steps. Notice how the sound changes pretty drastically when we move (transpose) the sample this far away from the source recording.
4) You can process the original sample in any and every way imaginable. Below, I’ve brought out the snare a bit and roughened it up with some saturation and reverb.
5) You can slice the sample up into discreet chunks and then reordered them. Below, I’ve used Ableton’s “slice to MIDI” to cut the bar into 8 sections, each lasting an 8th note in duration. Next, I randomized order of the slices, tweaked a few things, and created a “new” break.
6) Another option is to substitute your own sounds for the drums found in the sample (usually kick, snare, and hi-hat, at a minimum). You can do this manually or use Ableton’s “convert drums to MIDI” as a shortcut, though you’ll sometimes have to clean up what it spits out. Below you can see the four MIDI notes that trigger the (low to high) kick, snare, hi-hat, or crash sample.
Once you have your MIDI, you can use the stock 606 kit that Ableton provides or use your own samples. Then rearrange the MIDI clips, process, etc. to your liking.
7) Finally (for today), we can extract the groove from the original sample and apply it to our own beats to give them more of a “live” feel. The difference is subtle in this instance, but that won’t always be the case. Nor is that necessarily a bad thing—the simple beat is definitely improved with the extracted groove, but it certainly doesn’t scream “Impeach the President.”
There’s certainly lots more to do with using breaks as part of your creative process, but let’s leave it with these ideas for now.