Hip-hop producers mine two-bar drum breaks from funk and soul records as foundational rhythmic loops

The central raw material of early hip-hop was the drum break: a brief (usually one or two bar) passage where the band drops out and the drummer plays alone. These breaks existed in obscure funk, soul, and R&B records from the late 1960s and 1970s. Hip-hop DJs found that a single break, looped between two copies of the same record, could sustain a crowd indefinitely. When digital samplers arrived, producers could isolate these breaks digitally and build entire tracks on them. The crate-digging practice — buying and searching through old records at stores, thrift shops, basements — became a skilled practice: knowing which records contained the best breaks, the most ‘fat’ drum sounds, and the cleanest recordings.

Examples

Clyde Stubblefield’s drum break on James Brown’s ‘Funky Drummer’ (1969) became one of the most sampled breaks in history. ‘Basically, 70s Funk records’ were the primary source because ‘they were less EQ than most records so it left a lot of room for the Samplers.‘

Assessment

What is a ‘break’ in the context of a funk record? Why were 1970s funk drums particularly suitable for sampling? Name two examples of heavily sampled drums from the documentary.