I was rooting around on Youtube and saw some old videos of Octamed jungle (particularly some Urban Shakedown). How did people chop their breaks? Were they using sample cds or actually sampling the breaks off of records? Also, I noticed that they used short snips of parts such as the shuffled ghost notes, rather than using one-shots or full loops. Does anyone here know about this? Any tips or tricks?
TY
The particular break your lookin for would be the ‘amen break’’. There’s also the ‘Apache Break’ as well I have a lot of fun with but what you then do is use Renoise’s sample editor and put markers at every desperate interval that a new sound starts… After that you generate drum kit and it will be mapped from your z key row… Bam, you have your break. Chop it up and make it sound good… The rest is creativity and skills you’ll learn as you push forward.
Keep it up ban mon’
Bless!
I was rooting around on Youtube and saw some old videos of Octamed jungle (particularly some Urban Shakedown). How did people chop their breaks? Were they using sample cds or actually sampling the breaks off of records? Also, I noticed that they used short snips of parts such as the shuffled ghost notes, rather than using one-shots or full loops. Does anyone here know about this? Any tips or tricks?
TY
I don’t know how urban shakedown did their drums, but learning from old mod rips, trying to emulate that breakbeat rave sound I started out using loops in protracker. 4 bars, 16 lines each in a 64 length pattern. No sync button back then, so you had to manually pitch up the break with the keyboard & use finetune until it sounded tight. It would help to transpose the break a few octaves downwards when getting near the perfect setting and while tweaking the finetune and/or bpm values, listen for a setting where the sound would glitch & the setting where it wouldn’t.
I can’t remember if in protracker this was done in combination with looking at the sample editor, looking at the playback position in realtime to see at what setting it would touch the next beat, or if I did this in fasttracker 
.
Anywho, after getting the loops tight, I started using syncopation, programming the loops in simple patterns, using the 9XX command for offsets & shorter break elements for insertion between the loops. A higher bpm setting for moar resolution, triplets etc.
There are no rules really, one way of tracking beats back then. As there only were 4 hard panned mono tracks to play with anyway, you had to mix things up. Break loops, oneshots, offsets through pattern commands to save sample memory etc.
Here’s a track from celcius you can see some old tricks in;
Yeah, look at old modules until you find some, there should be archives sorted by genre.
Other than that: Have a breakbeat. Then make different “chops” starting with bassdrum, snare, or some hat/ghostsnare-pattern, but leave all trailing stuff in it. Then maybe sequence a very basic halftime-to-jungle-tempo-ragga-rhythm with it (bassdrum/snare), but in a single channel, and let the trailing stuff from the break hits play on, don’t cut it off. Do decorations with that hat/ghostsnare patterns, and let the other hits of it play on also, and stuff like this. You get the idea. It sound jungly. Try lots of (simple) patterns, and different “cuts” into the break to make your rythms. Some parts may use wilder cutting, but the principle is the same. You kind of keep the groove of the original break this way, it’s intermediate step between just looping the break and splitting it into oneshot-samples.
Try to have samples like that clean think “break” shaker pattern, shuffled groovy and such, and layer it upon the break. It’s important that these loops be not individual hits, but cuts with real groove and variation in sound. You can also sequence/cut the rhythmically, but less complex than the breakbeats.
You can layer two breaks that got cut the way above, but with different sound and different rhythms, so they sound like a single very complex percussion rhythm. When hats and snares sound very different, the better the effect will be. For trying different rhythms, start with like shifting one break by 1 or 1 1/2 beats relative to the other, and let it have different “trailing” patterns. You see - mayhem, the layered breaks jungle sound signature. Doing so deliberately is complex, but not impossible, random shit will often yield rewarding ryhthms. Don’t layer 6 breaks all the time, use it for climax, or short accents.
Pitch up everything in the tune, other than the main subbass. Yes, also the breaks. Breathe helium, kind of, the bass shall drag it down again and make it solid.
Some common fx used were a pad sample, pitched differently to make a chord progression, backdrop hooks from cheesy 80s disco tunes, pitched up a lot. That pitched 808 Bassdrum with long decay, used as subbass.
This is probably like how not only tracker people, but also the people with real emu samplers worked those days. But then again - a tracker was just a very cheap sampler, kind of.
To chop the breaks in renoise, choose method yourself - slice markers with “play on mode” can rock it, or just make cuts starting in the break from different positions, or the sample offset commands…
Sample people had, were from - duh, like where did people have samples from? Traded breaks among the percieved “elite”, until some were sold on cd, or in the tracker scene someone shared a module with a certain pure break in, and then everyone else ripped it. It be the beginning of the 90s, Internet was there, and before that lots BBS, everyone hat CD-Rom drives to rip CDs, and musicians often had other gear too. Be glad you can nowadays google all the breaks ever used.
just get yourself beat loops from back then, load them into renoise as a sample/instrument, go into waveform view, use slices, set it to 50%,
lateron alter/move/delete/add points to kickdrum, snare, hats … eventually pingpong loop some hats/rides/snares and maybe use some adsr
or comp …
and you’re set.
if needed, i’ll fix some xrni’s together.
ok, so i was bored and came up with some well known oldschool beats.
chopped up, comped, eq’d and sliced, for you to look at and to understand how the shit is done nowadays.
back then in the days we hadn’t had any slicers, we sliced them for real and had tons of samples.
well anyway, i hope you’ll kinda understand how people are handling beats nowadays.
ps: these are the real and original beat loops from original recordings…
pss: ye, i’ve ofcourse used dps, to alter the loops abit.
have fun!