Thanks. So, first and foremost, I want to say
that I'm a musician and make music as DAAT
with my friend Joseph Thibodeau
who's here with us today.
I first got into Hip-Hop back in the 90s,
growing up in New York
listening to Funkmaster Flex on Friday nights
on Hot 97.
A few years later
I got into Jungle and Drum & Bass...
and I recognized certain similarities
within the two kinds of music
but didn't really know what those were at the time.
It was really only later when I recognized
that these things that I was recognizing were...
breakbeats.
And they are the subject of what I research now
at the DMT Lab at BCU,
that's Birmingham City University.
So, in this talk I'm basically gonna go through
some breakbeat history,
and then talk about how breakbeats got into
the United Kingdom's genres of electronic music.
and then talk a bit about the breakbeat research
that we do at our lab
and also labs around the world.
So, as a brief definition, breakbeats are samples
of percussion solos from Funk or Jazz recordings
typically from vinyl records
from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Of course, it's not reduced down to just that.
But they're used in loads of genres
and sub-genres, all the way from things
like Hip-Hop and Hip-House, and Breakbeat-
Hardcore, all the way up to modern genres like
Vaporwave, even.
They were originally recorded from vinyl records
and segmented and manipulated on samplers,
and then rearranged
through the use of sequencers.
They generally have a 4/4 time signature,
they have heavy syncopation
in the individual parts,
but taken together, all these parts
reinforce the overall 4/4 meter.
Other breakbeats that are used
within the UK genres anyway...
Probably the most well-known is,
of course, the Amen breakbeat.
And that comes from a Funk 45 by The Winstons
and it sounds like this...
I would be shocked if you guys did not know that.
By a show of hands,
has anyone heard that one before?
Alright, good. We can go on...
So, Hip-Hop musicians such as NWA
were the first to appropriate breakbeats.
Here, the Amen is used
by slowing down the 2-measure phrase
and also has a hi-hat
that's been added on top of it.
Alternatively, Jungle producers sped up,
segmented and re-sequenced the Amen.
This is "Terrorist" by Renegade.
So, not only popular breakbeats like the Amen
are used in this kind of tradition.
Also breaks like Marvelous
by The Jungle Band are used.
And so here, icons Blame & Justice,
who are Jungle and Drum & Bass
producers from the UK,
they've used the "Marvelous" breakbeat in their
"Third Eye Visions" on Modern Urban Jazz.
So hopefully you can hear how the original
breakbeat maybe was morphed into
the percussion backbone of that track.
So typical instruments that generally get used in
breakbeats are those of the standard drum kit:
so you have bass drum, snare drum, hi-hats,
cymbals and floor toms.
But breakbeats can also include things like
bongos, tambourines, vocal shouts,
here, Michael Viner's Incredible Bongo Band
uses, of course, bongos in "Apache".
So, as to the reasons why producers
use breakbeats, my good friend Jason 0=0
offered his opinion on this subject
in an interview I conducted with him.
He said: "Someone hit those drums in a room,
the sound hit a mike, it bounced off a room,
and that hit the mike, that mike hit a preamp,
the preamp hit a tape,
that hit a compressor and an EQ, that hit a needle
which then carved acetate
to be stamped into records.
And so he concludes by saying: "That's a lot of
energy to have happen before someone like me
can start tearing those things apart".
So basically what he's saying is, he's looking for
a high energy sample as a way to go from that
into his own productions, and it's really important
that he has that raw, hard energy
before he gets involved
in moving into the next step.
So, just to drive the point home:
On the bottom here you have
a breakbeat that's been split up into measures
and also into individual hits.
And then some of those hits,
the ones that are wide on the bottom,
get re-used in creating
that percussion arrangement
that someone would use in their track.
There's a relationship that every artist ends up
having, and they implicitly understand this.
That there's a reverence for breakbeats
in the sense that they have a cultural lineage
associated with them.
And there's a desire to redefine them as well.
So the original artist
wants to put their own stamp onto it as well.
So, that could be a very good thing,
and it is a very good thing.
However, it does have a collective effect
on the historical trace of the original piece
and the musicians that recorded it.
Take for example the track "Amen, Brother".
Originally that was recorded in 1969
by The Winstons.
And because so many people use it, they say,
"Amen Break" or "The Amen", right.
All of a sudden you might get into a position
where years down the line
we're looking at Apple Loops 63,
or whatever it was,
and out of thousands,
and we no longer call it the Amen,
and we lose sight
of the people who actually created it.
That's a very important thing to remember
in how you use breakbeats.
They have their origin
in New Orleans street processional drumming,
also called Street Beats.
They were first appropriated for the drum kit
in the 1950s,
and this is often tributed to Earl Palmer
who was the drummer for Professor Longhair.
And this is Professor Longhair's "Tipitina".
This was recorded in 1953.
So a few years later, James Brown's drummers
Clayton Fillyau and Clyde Stubblefield,
played drum arrangements that were
characterized by 16th-note grooves,
with very little swing, within 2-4 bar patterns.
They created anticipation
through the use of syncopation,
cross rhythms between the instruments,
and also repetition.
Big tunes of this time were "Cold Sweat",
"Soul Pride", and then, "Funky Drummer".
So, breakbeats were originally appropriated
by DJs in New York,
such as Kool Herc, who found that dancers
were jiving with the break sections of funk tunes
much more than other parts of the sections
that he was playing.
So he would extend those sections indefinitely
using two turntables and a mixer.
Grandmaster Flash
then incorporated beat matching
to improve the seamless transitions
between the breaks that he would play.
Musicians later recorded
pause tapes with breakbeats.
These were made by repeatedly cueing up
breakbeats on vinyl records
and then using the 'pause' and 'record'
functionality on tapedecks.
Later than that, producers would use samplers
like the SP-12, followed by the SP-1200
then the MPC series samplers
to cut up or chop breakbeats...
and align them with 808 samples for effects.
So, moving into the UK.
Hardcore, Jungle and Drum & Bass -
these are UK-based genres
that are based in an international continuum
of electronic music.
They came to be through the intersection
of the UK's own interests
in Rave and Rare groove.
This was coupled with the influx of Electro,
Hip-Hop, Detroit techno and other genres.
And more recent genres after that can be seen
as part of that continuum as well,
in the sense that the musical timbres
and rhythms associated with them
are related to Hardcore, Jungle and Drum & Bass.
This music was made in home studios mostly,
like this one.
This one's the home studio of Andrew Wright
who went under the name of Mercy,
and here you have a Commodore Amiga
that would be used for the sequencing
you have a Ensoniq EPS 16+,
that would be the sampler that he was using.
Synthesis and mixer modules, and also records
that would be used as sources of samples.
The earliest samplers
that were used by Hardcore musicians
were models like the Akai s612 on top there.
Early samplers had limited memory
and limited functionality
which restricted the amount of manipulation
you could make with breakbeats.
The s612 there from 1985 had about 4 kHz
sample rate up to 32 kHz sample rate.
But if you used that 32 kHz sample rate
you'd end up with only 1 second of sample time.
So that's very little in comparison to the unlimited
way we deal with things today, right?
So if you're going to use the "Funky Drummer",
you'd only be able to get this much of it in...
So a lot of really good tunes were made
with that little bit of sample time,
a lot of really really good tunes
were made by chopping up that into a kick drum,
some hats and a snare.
Now...
with limited technology comes amazing technique.
Some of these guys who were working
during this era thought:
Hey, I know how to get more
of that breakbeat into that sampler.
So what they would do is speed up the record
upon going into the sampler itself
so they'd be playing it at a faster rate.
Like this...
And then they would change the route note
that they would actually play the tune at...
and so you'd end up with something like this...
If that's not ingenious enough...
The foresight to see that you could have that
crusty sound actually make the tune better
is also really cool, right? So...
In many ways, that technique shaped the sound
of the genre at that early time.
A few years later you had things like the Akai
s950. That 950 had some really cool effects on it.
It also had a little more sampling time, too.
But it had time-stretching and pitch-shifting
capabilities on it
that allowed you to kind of add
a particular timbral variation to your sound.
And on the upper limit of the way that this thing
could adjust the sound,
"Funky Drummer" might sound like this...
And after that... Shortly after that anyway,
the s1000 came out,
and that was the first CD quality sampler
that existed that people had access to.
On top of that you could buy a CD-ROM
and you could use that for extracting breakbeats
off of CD-ROMS that you could purchase.
So all of a sudden you had a whole new range
of sample sources
that you could use at your disposal.
After that, modulation became really the thing,
so Roland's s-760 and the E-MU series samplers,
the E series samplers came out,
and those allowed producers
a range of modulation capabilities
to add nuanced control to their sounds.
So you could kind of have the release of a trigger,
trigger something else,
based on using modulation.
So when recording breaks into samplers,
one of the techniques that people used
was to record the entire break onto one key.
And they would take that same sample and put
that on the next key and then chop off the first hit.
Then they'd take that and copy that
to the next key and chop off that next hit.
And they'd keep doing that all the way down
until there's only one hit left.
This allowed people to have access
to any position within the break
and you could move
between any position within the break.
The problem with it though is that people were
locked into specific tempos.
So you'd have to record in the break in a specific
tempo and then adjust it from there.
Another technique that people used
was to sample individual hits to different keys.
This still allows you to have access
to any position within the break
and you can re-sequence quite easily.
But the problem with it...
you'd have to be quite savvy
with knowing the rhythm of the original break
to play that break back
within a particular time and flow.
So that was kind of a problem, and then,
Propellerhead came out
with this ingenious program in 1994.
which is called Recycle.
Recycle basically would give you
a semi-automatic slicing,
and then the cool thing about it is that it would
give you a midi file to preserve the rhythm.
That means
that you would load the slices into a sampler
and then load the midi file into a sequencer,
and then make modifications to the midi file,
to make your own percussion arrangement.
So, what does it all sound like, right?
When breakbeats were first introduced into
Hardcore, several House and Techno producers
used whole measures of breakbeats in their tunes
often to increase the intensity of their tunes.
This is Manix with Oblivion
on Reinforced from 1991.
And around 1992,
Hardcore began to split into two genes:
A lighter, more playful sound with high-pitched
vocals and rave-style pianos,
was continued into Happy Hardcore.
A darker, more ominous sound
was embodied by Jungle.
Breakbeats were typically segmented and
rearranged to a much greater extent in Jungle.
And a common technique that was used
was re-triggering.
which would be the repeated playing of segments
of the breakbeat as appose to whole measures.
Breakbeats were played at a faster tempo
in the samplers
which had the effect of shifting them
upwards in the spectrum.
This left a large amount of space
for long, low-frequency bass tones.
This is exemplified in Origin Unknown's
"Valley of the Shadows".
And, so, these edits became intricately
associated with the genres,
and you can really hear tonnes of edits
which would be quite wild, for 1993 anyways,
in DJ Hype's "The Trooper".
You can also take note of the additional layering
and doubling of the breaks
that were associated with different pitches.
So pitching and time-based effects
were also used heavily.
D-Cruze's Jungle tracks were a continuation
of his Hardcore output.
In "Lonely", check out how he makes certain
drum hits change pitch
during the held note with a glide effect.
This kind of plays
with the listener's sense of time.
Known for his "Renegade Snares" anthem,
Omni-Trio also made a B side called London Step
which was regarded as off-the-path for the era.
What was so unique about this
at the time was that
he used those filtered Amens that came in bursts.
And this hinted at a 2-step arrangement that was
gonna become the norm in the following years...
after the influx of Alex Reece and others.
So in a similar sense, Dillinja, who was known for
his heavier breakbeat edits and manipulations
before this era... He produced
the Basic Principles remix for Alex Reece.
And it contains a lot of stuttered
and chopped up breaks.
But the way that they're constructed and the way
that Dillinja's tracks changed after this point
demonstrate a major and deliberate shift in
Drum & Bass towards this 2-step rhythm pattern.
In this context you can hear it with breakbeats
as appose to Alex Reece's drum machines.
So continuing the trend to move away
from more complex rhythms of Jungle,
Atmospheric came about, and that was originally
termed "Intelligent" or "Ambient".
And it was often a less aggressive
and Jazz or Funk infused form of Drum & Bass.
While breaks were still used, they were often
used with less attention to heavy edits.
So, this is "Links" by Chameleon, and it appeared
on the Logical Progression compilation.
So this isn't to say that there was a full movement
away from technicality and innovation.
For example, you have Tango's "Understanding",
that has a lot
of pitching and re-triggering of breaks,
and achieves
an incredible rising and falling effect.
And if you check the layered hats, too,
it adds nuanced intensity
to the break
upon repeated phrases.
That was sick.
That was just... that was sick.
So, in the mid-90s, producers
like Dillinja and Dom & Roland
became synonymous
with elaborate breakbeat edits and manipulations,
and they incorporated
multiple layers and break-switching
to keep
the intensity of their tunes peaking constantly.
So, here you have "Dynamics" by Dom & Roland.
So skipping forward to a modern day context,
there's certainly been a revivalist tradition
in the last few years.
Producers are generally using breaks
in a more traditional format,
and a good example of this
would be Head High's "Hex Factor".
So this revivalist tradition
isn't just limited to techno.
Paul Woolford's 'Special Request' alias
is also devoted
to the Hardcore and early Jungle aesthetic.
Also breakbeat enthusiasts like Fracture
are also pushing boundaries
with incorporating breaks into their new tunes.
And here it's subtle,
but it's definitely there and it definitely moves.
Current breakbeat research aims to understand
breakbeats as a transmission medium.
And also to improve the flexibility of the samples.
One of the main goals is to identify the trace
of a breakbeat from its original conception
through different artist's usages in their tunes.
So perhaps you want to see how usages change
from iteration to iteration.
Maybe you want to see
how certain rhythms were adopted.
Or maybe you want to see who used certain
breakbeats first in particular genres.
Or you want to see which breakbeats
are most popular within particular genres.
So, for example, you might want to look
at Bay B Kane's "Hello Darkness" from 1994.
So if we did automate an analysis on that
we'd find that he used
"The Assembly Line" breakbeat
by the Commodores from 20 years previous.
So if you were to analyze "Hello Darkness"
and then a whole data-set full of tracks
and found ones that used "The Assembly Line",
you could see how the rhythms were used
within all those tunes,
and then you could compare them
and find out who used which ones first,
which samples were used,
how they were pitched down or adjusted.
And this is very similar to the kind of information
you can gather from the popular site:
Who Sampled, where it uses user data
to define who used particular samples
and make connections like that.
This is in many ways, automating this type of stuff
in a research capacity.
So the developed algorithms rely on automated
detection of events in musical time.
So, with an audio waveform, you can extract
onsets, or places where notes occur.
Beats, which is where you snap
and you listen to a piece of music,
and downbeats: finding the musical 'one'
or the first beat in every measure.
In addition to this, we also try to find
where drums occur within musical time,
so we'll use onsets and then figure out
what drums are occurring at those positions.
We then use this information, and automatically
determine which breakbeat is being used,
and likely breakbeat arrangements that are
inherent within a track that we're analysing.
And so to improve the accuracy of a system,
one of the sub-tasks that we're working on
at the DMT lab at BCU is drum transcription.
So, one of the PHD students there, Carl Southall,
and Brian Stables and myself,
worked on this system that used neural networks
to try to extract
where hi-hats, snare drums and kick drums occur
within a musical signal.
And it takes that information and then produces
a score-style representation out of that.
Another area of research that's around
breakbeats is essentially the de-mixing
of individual components within a mix.
So in this sense we're talking about the individual
streams being kick drum, snare drum,
hi-hat, crash cymbal, what have you.
This is called source separation.
And Christian Dittmar from Fraunhoffer
developed a method that uses a musical score
to help aid the separability
of drums within breakbeats,
which basically solves the problem
of overlapping tails.
So if you have a crash cymbal that rides over
several different other hits,
you might not be able to re-sequence
that in a certain way
because that crash cymbal
is going over those hits.
This gets around that. So for example,
if you have the Amen.
Say you don't want that ride cymbal on top.
You could basically, effectively move it.
Or say you didn't want the kick
and you just wanted the snare and the ride.
Or you just want the snare.
So you have quite
a few more re-sequencing options
when you able to separate all the streams.
And then you can adjust them as you choose
as appose to having to deal with things
that are on top of each other.
So as for future breakbeats, there's a lot
we can learn about how they've been used
that at present
is just very much assumed knowledge.
A large-scale data analysis would help confirm
a lot of this information.
So, source separation is also very important
to keep working on for more flexible usage.
We're also looking into automated rhythm
and timbral information for effects processing.
Timbre transformations for effects processing.
The source separation would also allow for more
possibilities in remixing the audio,
possibly in a 3D audio or spatialisation context.
In a performative or producing context,
probabilistic slicing of drums
is also something that would be really interesting
to focus on yet again in the future.
Nick Collins' excellent BBcut software
is a good jumping off position for this,
and Max for Live is a great environment
to be working on this kind of thing in.
And finally, a Holy Grail kind of task that I would
like to see happen would be
an effects chain deconstruction
where you could estimate the different effects
that producers have applied to breakbeats.
So, if you have an original breakbeat,
and then you have a final tune
that uses that breakbeat, what effects were
applied to make that happen?
what parameters of those effects
were applied to make that happen?
It's a long way off, but it's a...
So was source separation at one point, so...
I'll stop there, and say thanks for listening.
