processing funk breaks

J

jbomba

New Member
Joined
Aug 10, 2009
Hey peeps just starting to come to grips with slicing up old funk breaks and processing them. Ive downloaded the bourbon breaks pack from DOA. Just wondering how everyone goes about processing them , at the moment im bringing the break into logic and flattening it out with with eq & normalising it. I then bounce that break and chop it at the transients.Then ill seperate each hit onto a seperate channel and apply more eq & compression. After this the break sounds ok but not great , wondering if peeps could share some techniques. Also do you guys layer your breaks? im going for a neuro sound and people advise me to layer my kicks with 808 bass drums and natural sounding snares & to stay away from vengence samples if i want the beat to sound gritty. Im planning on making a video tutorial on doing this cause i havnt seen one good one yet. So go on share your techniques and help me out
 
treat each element of the break sperately (kicks, snares, rims and hats).

one break rarely has everything you want so you have to combine a few.
 
If you are starting with a funk break this is IMPORTANT!!!!!!!

Start of by looking at the break in voxengo span.Most of the tracks funk breaks are sampled from tracks recorded in bad rooms,so there's alot of resonant frequencies that will need removing in the top end. The easiest way to find these is by doing a norrow 10dB boost on an eq and searching through the frequencies for that horrible "ringing" then cut that range till it looks flat in span using high q/res values.

Now you need to get rid of the horrible reverb from the room aswell-Simply chop up the break and use fade outs/or the decay feature on a sampler to get the break to sound dry so you can add a high quality better sounding reverb like altiverb later.

To keep the break consistant I would advise picking out your favourite Kick,snare,shuffle and hat to resequence out.You will need to pitch the break(normally by about 2 semi tones) when bringing it to dnb Tempo.


In the last issue of knowledge mag there is a tutorial on processing old funk breaks by david carbone.You can read it for free on the knowledge website.Just go to the back issues section....

Hope that's been of some use

---------- Post added at 15:28 ---------- Previous post was at 15:21 ----------

Overdrive is a type of distortion! But it's best to eq/pitch the break and get it sounding clean first before adding dirt. Izotope Trash is amazing for multiband "surgical" distortion on breaks...
 
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Im just starting to get into using breaks more...

Basically what I understand is if you have a drum pattern with snares and such... What you do is layer a break on top of this pattern and high pass it? (sometimes, if that is what you want)
This fills it out more I think...

Am I correct? This is one use of breaks?
 
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Krispy said:
If you are just using the break to layer it on top of your drum pattern to fill it out more can't you just throw it on and high pass it?
Click to expand...

yeah! this is more about building drum 'kits' from breaks so you can have more control over each element and effectivly write the patterns (y)
 
in answer to your edited question... a really splashy, cymbal and high end driven break high passed can really fill out your own drum pattern
 
if u want to see breaks used to great effect:

chase & status masterclass:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYMC57ldgE4

ive only been producing dnb for a few months and in every track ive made ive always used a break..but high passed quite a lot, just to add that shuffle to the beat.
now im getting to the point where im chopping the break up and rearranging it to make my own pattern n adding other percussion etc.

its all about getting the right blend of sounds to get a good rhythm/groove.
 
I've been doing it the oldskool way recently. Instead of chopping the sound to bits, I just pitch or stretch it to fit the tempo in the track and trigger the break from different places and let it play out the natural rolls and hihats and what have you. This can give much more life-like feel to your drums. Sort of keeps the groove to it, instead of quantizing it to the 'machine funk'. Also rolls along much more nicely. Like everything, it doesnt fit everywhere but it's especially meaty with splashy breaks like the amen or cold sweat.
 
cyclone_uk said:
If you are starting with a funk break this is IMPORTANT!!!!!!!

Start of by looking at the break in voxengo span.Most of the tracks funk breaks are sampled from tracks recorded in bad rooms,so there's alot of resonant frequencies that will need removing in the top end. The easiest way to find these is by doing a norrow 10dB boost on an eq and searching through the frequencies for that horrible "ringing" then cut that range till it looks flat in span using high q/res values.

Now you need to get rid of the horrible reverb from the room aswell-Simply chop up the break and use fade outs/or the decay feature on a sampler to get the break to sound dry so you can add a high quality better sounding reverb like altiverb later.

To keep the break consistant I would advise picking out your favourite Kick,snare,shuffle and hat to resequence out.You will need to pitch the break(normally by about 2 semi tones) when bringing it to dnb Tempo.


In the last issue of knowledge mag there is a tutorial on processing old funk breaks by david carbone.You can read it for free on the knowledge website.Just go to the back issues section....

Hope that's been of some use

---------- Post added at 15:28 ---------- Previous post was at 15:21 ----------

Overdrive is a type of distortion! But it's best to eq/pitch the break and get it sounding clean first before adding dirt. Izotope Trash is amazing for multiband "surgical" distortion on breaks...
Click to expand...

Hey mate keen on checking out that david carbone tutorial cant seem to find which issue it is in
 
get ur funk break to speed and tight
copy kick to two channels ( or bus it to two channels) one will be for "low" frq, one will be "high" freqs
on the low find its natural low end peak, cut either side with dramatic eq all you will be left with is a low resonate "umph"
now with the "high" channel of your kick...find the high end peak (character) boost it a little, and dramatically eq away every thing else..this will leave the drum hit..you might want to add distortion or something. But this should leave you a cleaner weightier kick.

apply this theory to the snares and other elements. Hats may only need low cuts.

this all takes practice, once youve done the above you might want to compress them together a bit, add distortion bus to glue them a bit. it can get tricky when hats land on kicks so you might keep those in, or use a clean hat layer

its full geek but works well, the next tune i chuck on soundcloud will have an example of this..all my old breaks sound ungood :mad:

---------- Post added at 10:22 ---------- Previous post was at 10:19 ----------

as for layering..id recommend 909 kits over 808s, specially for cleaner neuro stuff. they sound very venegeance
 
cyclone_uk said:
If you are starting with a funk break this is IMPORTANT!!!!!!!

Start of by looking at the break in voxengo span.Most of the tracks funk breaks are sampled from tracks recorded in bad rooms,so there's alot of resonant frequencies that will need removing in the top end. The easiest way to find these is by doing a norrow 10dB boost on an eq and searching through the frequencies for that horrible "ringing" then cut that range till it looks flat in span using high q/res values.

Now you need to get rid of the horrible reverb from the room aswell-Simply chop up the break and use fade outs/or the decay feature on a sampler to get the break to sound dry so you can add a high quality better sounding reverb like altiverb later.

To keep the break consistant I would advise picking out your favourite Kick,snare,shuffle and hat to resequence out.You will need to pitch the break(normally by about 2 semi tones) when bringing it to dnb Tempo.


In the last issue of knowledge mag there is a tutorial on processing old funk breaks by david carbone.You can read it for free on the knowledge website.Just go to the back issues section....

Hope that's been of some use

---------- Post added at 15:28 ---------- Previous post was at 15:21 ----------

Overdrive is a type of distortion! But it's best to eq/pitch the break and get it sounding clean first before adding dirt. Izotope Trash is amazing for multiband "surgical" distortion on breaks...
Click to expand...
I like this guy.
 
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