Digital sampling lets producers cut, loop, and re-order individual break hits into wholly new patterns

Before digital sampling, looping a break meant cutting and splicing tape or constantly backspinning two records. With digital sampling and computer editing, a program can cut, paste, and loop breakbeats endlessly, and digital effects — filters, reverb, reversing, time-stretching, and pitch-shifting — can be applied to the whole break or to individual sounds within it. Most powerfully, individual instruments from within a breakbeat can be isolated and recombined with others, creating wholly new breakbeat patterns rather than reusing the loop intact. This non-destructive workflow underpins all contemporary breakbeat production. It also spawned a commercial product: ‘breakbeat kit’ CDs bundling many sliced breaks from different songs, often distributed without the original artists’ permission or knowledge.

Examples

Isolating a break’s snare and kick hits and re-sequencing them into a new pattern; applying time-stretch to fit a break to a faster tempo; breakbeat kit CDs sold as ready-to-use sample packs.

Assessment

Explain what time-stretching does to a drum break and why it is needed when using one break at different BPMs; name one artefact it can introduce.