Nice to wake up to a breakbeat thread on HN! I grew up making/listening to funk, hiphop and drum and bass. Crate digging for breaks in old record stores was fu

Nice to wake up to a breakbeat thread on HN! I grew up making/listening to funk, hiphop and drum and bass. Crate digging for breaks in old record stores was fun - that was a thing that got started by hip hop DJs/producers state side and was such a buzz to find a few bars of naked drums on a record. I have hundreds of breaks from crate digging back in the day, there’s a lot you can learn about production by dissecting them - figuring out how they sounded so fat - drum miking, compression, tape saturation, great playing. These days there’s a lot of multitracks floating around and also ML stem separators make it pretty easy to extract drums from anywhere (although with a bit of phasing artifacts). It’s interesting that to my knowledge there haven’t been any copyright lawsuits for drum breaks - although the record industry has been vicious about suing for sampling anything else - maybe one day in the future there will be and all aging DnB producers will be bankrupted :D Back to the amen - it’s a special break. It has so much energy, especially sped up - to the best of my knowledge started by a couple of UK DJs mixing in hiphop records with house/acid with these breaks on them, playing at 44rpm instead of 33rpm to try to beat match them - and seeing the crowd reaction. There was an origin story on one of the Fabio & Grooverider shows of which London club this first happened and how it took off from there - people deliberately recreating that sound with sampling and chopped up/sped up breaks. Amen still reigns supreme although there’s a lot of other great breaks too!