Breakcore
Every break at once, edited past the point of usefulness.
The pattern
2 bars, sixteenth notes. Loops until you stop it.
Written at 190, true tempo, two bars, and this one carries a warning. Real breakcore edits at the thirty-second and sixty-fourth note, and a sixteenth grid physically cannot show that. What is here is the skeleton: bar one carries six kicks and eight snare hits, with the snare velocities running from 44 to 120 so the loud and quiet chops still read as chops. To get the actual sound, take this into your DAW, halve the grid twice, and split roughly a third of these hits into pairs and triplets of retriggers. Bar two shares almost nothing with bar one, which is the point. Above 210 the file will not carry the tempo, so raise it in the project instead.
What it is
What happened when jungle's editing and gabber's distortion met in the late nineties, mostly around Praxis in Berlin and a scattering of producers with too much time and a copy of a tracker. Venetian Snares, Bong-Ra and Enduser cut breaks at the thirty-second note and below, stacked them, ran them through distortion, and dropped clipped kicks underneath. The joke and the point are the same: the break is treated as a sample library rather than as a rhythm, and the listener is expected to keep up.
What it sounds like
Overwhelming and clipped. Amen fragments arriving faster than the ear can resolve, a distorted kick that is really a square wave with an envelope, crash cymbals used as punctuation rather than accents, and abrupt silences. Underneath it there is often something incongruous: an anime sample, a Hungarian folk melody, a string quartet. The dynamic range is close to zero because everything is driven into a limiter and left there.
Key elements
- Sub-sixteenth editsChops at the thirty-second and sixty-fourth note. The grid below is a sixteenth-note approximation and cannot show them, which is the honest position rather than a workaround.
- The distorted kickA gabber kick: a 909 bass drum overdriven until the body becomes a pitched square wave. It occupies the same space as the break's own kick and wins.
- Stacked breaksTwo or three breaks running at once, each processed differently. The density is the aesthetic and separating them cleanly is not the goal.
- Crashes as punctuationA crash cymbal every bar or half bar, marking the edit boundaries. It is doing the job a downbeat would do in music with a stable downbeat.
- Sudden silenceA full beat of nothing after thirty consecutive hits. The contrast is the only dynamic tool left once everything is limited.
How to get them
- Work at thirty-second resolutionSet the sequencer grid to thirty-seconds or sixty-fourths before you start. Programming this at sixteenths and hoping for the best is the main reason amateur breakcore sounds slow rather than dense.
- Gabber kickTake a 909 kick, overdrive it hard, then low-pass at about 400Hz and add a pitch envelope falling an octave over 200ms. Tune it, because at this density the kick is the only pitched element the listener will track.
- Retrigger, do not drawUse a beat repeat or a slicer with randomised slice selection to generate the density, then edit the result by hand. Drawing sixty-four notes a bar into a piano roll produces something mechanical.
- Clip rather than compressA hard clipper on the drum bus instead of a limiter. At this hit density a compressor never recovers between transients and the whole thing turns to mush.
- Write the tempo downMuch of this music sits at 200 to 240. The download here is at 190; if you want it faster, change the project tempo rather than repitching the file, so the drum samples keep their own pitch.
Reference points
Venetian Snares, Bong-Ra, Enduser, DJ Scud, Shitmat, Aaron Spectre, and Planet Mu, Praxis and Ad Noiseam as labels. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.
The pattern is a starting point rather than a rule. If you want the theory underneath why any of it works, Battuto measures it.