Breakbeats and rhythm section loops lifted from vintage funk, R&B and rock tracks have long been part and parcel of electronic and dance music, playing a defining role in the sounds of hip-hop, drum ’n’ bass, house and pop. Although the likes of the ’Amen’, ’Think’, ‘Apache’, ‘Levee’ and countless other legendary breaks are readily available to anyone with an internet connection, copyright, production quality and other considerations lead many producers to recreate them from scratch instead. Here are some pointers for reproducing established classic breaks or coming up with evocative retro-styled loops entirely of your own invention.

Get the band together

If time, space and possibly money are no object, the best way to create your own original breakbeats and loops is to record them yourself. Obviously, the capable multi-instrumentalist has a head start here, being able to track everything themself, part by part, but for maximum authenticity, you’ll want to get your ’band’ playing together at the same time, even if it’s just a bass player and a drummer. So, get some musician friends over for the day or hire some session players if you’ve got the budget (make sure your studio is set up and ready to go before they arrive!), and blast out as many grooves and breaks as you can in the time allowed.

Ultimately, the goal is to end up with a stereo loop of each break that sounds like it was produced in the era being evoked, so mix your multitrack recording down with that in mind, outside of the context of any track in which you might be planning to use it. It needs to stand up as its own self-contained loop in every sense, for moulding to your tracks as you would a genuine vinyl-lifted break.

Choose the right instruments

If, as is likely in the average home studio, recording live musicians isn’t an option, you’ll have to create your vintage breaks using virtual instrument plugins – for which, happily, you’re truly spoilt for choice. The first consideration should be the drum kit, and for old-school sounds, Toontrack EZdrummer 2 and Superior Drummer 3, FXpansion BFD3, UJAM DEEP and XLN Audio Addictive Drums 2 offer various retro-themed kits, while Kontakt users should check out the Abbey Road 60s and 70s Drummer libraries that come with Native Instruments Komplete, amongst others.

Bass and guitar are also well represented in the Kontakt space (Session Guitarist Electric Vintage, Scarbee MM Bass et al), while organs and electric pianos such as Arturia B-3 V and AAS Lounge Lizard 4 have you more than covered for keyboards. And finally, for strings, brass and other orchestral noises, look no further than David Tobin’s 2020 round-up.

The miracle of audio-to-MIDI

When trying to remake a specific breakbeat with your own replacement sounds (and some degree of compositional variation to get around copyright, of course), the audio-to-MIDI conversion systems offered by various DAWs (Ableton Live, Logic Pro X, Pro Tools etc) prove incredibly useful. Not so long ago considered one of the ’holy grails’ of music production, this now commonplace technology analyses the pitch, timing and dynamics of an audio clip and spits out a representative MIDI file. Depending on the source material, this might emerge perfectly mapped or require some editing to knock into shape, and the technique only really works on single instrumental elements – ie, it’s not going to separate a mixed drums, bass and keys loop, for example. If you need to nab a beat or chord progression as MIDI with its all-important timing kept intact, though, audio-to-MIDI conversion is a quick and easy way to do it.

Get their groove on

Related to the previous tip, every DAW provides the means to impose the rhythmic feel of an audio part on the positioning and velocities of notes in a MIDI clip – it’ll be called ’groove map’, ’groove template’ or similar, depending on your platform of choice. This is the way to go when you’re just looking to bring the funky ‘live’ sensibility of a classic loop to your own programmed drum, bass and other lines, rather than copy it note for note.

Having extracted the groove map from the sample in question, simply apply it to the MIDI clip(s) of your home-made break to align its note timings and velocities accordingly. You might need to thin the map out or dial down the depth to which it’s applied if the source break involves multiple instruments, or tweak certain notes afterwards to finesse the results, but this is a great way to make your MIDI-based loop sound like it’s being played by real musicians.

Play it, don’t program it

Although audio-to-MIDI and groove template functions are ideal for working the feel of a live break into a programmed MIDI clip, if you really want to make the loop your own, make the effort to play its constituent parts in live using a MIDI keyboard or other controller, even if it means slowing the project tempo right down temporarily and comping together the best bits of 50 takes. If you’re stuck for musical inspiration, stick on an old funk cut and jam along!

Age the sound

Having flawlessly recreated the notes and instrumentation of your copied classic break, or cooked up a convincingly flavoursome original one, the final stage is making it sound like it was engineered at a studio of the period. With a wealth of vintage effects emulation plugins out there to suit all budgets, piecing together authentic analogue channel strips like those that would have been used to produce those seminal records back in the day is a cinch – developers to investigate include Universal Audio, IK Multimedia, Acustica Audio and Slate Digital, to name just four of many.

The finishing touch is to artificially age your loop with tape saturation, vinyl crackle and other ‘retro-fying’ processors, which we’ll be taking a closer look at in an an imminent post.

How do you get your old-school-style breakbeats sounding on point? Let us know in the comments.