Amen Break Swapping Instrument 🥁

Break swapping is an amazingly powerful tool to make your drum work really stand out from the masses. However, as i'm sure many of your have realised, it's not as easy to implement as it seems. The processing, level balancing, drum groove, tuning and of course choice of breaks all have a massive impact on the final result.

One of my favourite ways to implement this is to swap breaks every 4 bars or so like this great tune by Seba & Paradox.

I'm going to break this down in an upcoming YouTube video so stay tuned for that. The most important thing to consider here is resampling, it's the only way you can effectively capture all these live movements of hardware and software parameters.

Rolling sampler is a great & afforable way to achieve this without the need for loopback recording.

The Processing

This is essentially an Amen break processed in almost every way I can think 🔥:

• Choosing the left vs right side of the Break for variation (all breaks are in mono).
• Snappy/Gated - Transient Shaper pull in sustain.
• Saturated & Clipping - Drive Akai s1000, Decimort 2.
• Filtered & Distorted - Filter Freak + Filter Movement.
• Compressed - 1176 type compression slam (Purple Audio MC77).
• Akai Downsample - Pitch up/down up to 36 semitones into the Akai S1000.
• Phasey Movement - duplicate break and detune or offset 1 version.
• Decimort Downsample Movement.
• Mid Scoop EQ.
• Layered Amen - Kick/Snare Layered.
• Pitched vs Not Pitched! - Gate to Tempo method and recording pitch movement.
• Plate Reverb - Add specific metallic resonances though Plate reverb + EQ.
• Short Delay Time (6ms to 32ms) - karplus strong.

Of course you can combine any and all of these for some really wild results 🚀

All the breaks run at the same speed (168BPM) so you should be able to program everything on the grid and just transpose between different chops.

Enjoy everyone, this is essentially just bonus material for this month :)

Let me know what you think!

George ✌️