Funky Breaks

What it is

By 1996 the British breakbeat scene had split. One half went to jungle and one half stayed at 130, and the half that stayed spent five years arguing about what to call itself. Funky breaks is the branch that kept its hip-hop manners: the Freestylers, Krafty Kuts, the Scratch Perverts on the decks, ragga MCs on the mic, and a break that is still recognisably somebody's drum solo rather than a chopped-up abstraction. It is not the big beat side, which took the same tempo and pointed it at a guitar amp, and it is not nu skool breaks, which came a year or two later and put a sub bass at the centre. The distinguishing habit here is that the record is built for a DJ to cut on, so the arrangement leaves holes to scratch into.

What it sounds like

Warm, mid-forward and busy. A funk break with its own hi-hats intact and the room tone left in, a fat electric bassline doubling the kick, and horn or organ stabs lifted off a soul record. The vocal is a ragga toast or a hip-hop acapella laid across the top. Scratches everywhere, and the transform and chirp patterns are as much a part of the arrangement as the drums. Compression is heavy but not distorted, so the break breathes rather than squashing flat. Everything is slightly swung, because the source recording was.

Key elements

• The break kept wholeOne loop, chosen for its swing, edited only to move a kick or drop a snare. The Apache and the Assembly Line breaks show up constantly, and the point is that you can still hear it as a performance.
• Bass doubling the kickAn electric or sampled bass playing the same rhythm as the break's bass drum, not the root of the bar. This is a funk arrangement habit and it is what makes the low end sound played rather than programmed.
• Scratch as an instrumentCuts on the fourth bar of every phrase, with a chirp on the last sixteenth. Records were mixed with a hole at 2kHz specifically so the scratch would sit in it.
• Ragga toast on topA dancehall vocal at 134, either sampled or recorded fresh. Freestylers built a career on the pairing and it separates this cleanly from anything American at the same tempo.
• Horn stabsTwo or three notes off a soul record, pushed onto offbeats. They arrive late in the bar rather than on the downbeat, which is a hip-hop production habit rather than a rave one.

How to get them

• Pick the break for its swing, then keep itLoad the loop and check where its offbeat sixteenths sit before you quantise anything. If you flatten a funk break to a straight grid you have made a big beat track by accident.
• Set swing at 55 percentPush the offbeat sixteenths about a tenth of a step late across the whole kit. Not the two thirds that hip-hop uses, because at 134 that drags, and not straight, because the break itself is not.
• Bass follows the breakTranscribe where the break's own kick falls and put the bass notes there. Use a sampled electric bass with a bit of finger noise and roll off below 55Hz so it stays in the mids where the funk is.
• Leave a hole for the cutMute the stabs and the vocal for the fourth bar of every eight-bar phrase. That gap is where a DJ scratches, and building a track without it is why a lot of home-made attempts sound crowded.
• Parallel compress, do not crushSend the break to a bus compressor at 8:1 with a 30ms attack, then blend it back at about 30 percent. You get the weight without losing the ghost notes, and the ghosts are the reason you picked the break.
• Ride the filter on the loopA high-pass sweep up to 400Hz over the last two bars of a phrase and back down, drawn by hand. It is a live-mixer move written into the arrangement, and it does more for the energy than adding drums.

Reference points

The Freestylers, Krafty Kuts, Dynamite MC, Rennie Pilgrem, Botchit and Scarper, Finger Lickin and Freskanova. Named as reference points for the sound rather than as endorsements.