Jungle

What it is

London, 1993 and 1994, and the moment the break stopped being a loop and became raw material. Hardcore producers sped their breaks up past 160, dropped the four to the floor kick entirely, and let the chopped drums carry the whole rhythm while a reggae-derived sub bass carried everything else. The break in question is almost always the Amen: six seconds of Gregory Coleman's drumming on Amen, Brother by The Winstons, recorded in 1969, sampled off a compilation, and reprogrammed by thousands of people who mostly never heard the original record. Jungle is what happens when the sampler is used as an editing tool rather than a playback device.

What it sounds like

Fast, dense drums with a slow, heavy bass underneath, and the gap between the two speeds is the whole feeling. The break is bright and grainy from being pitched up through cheap converters. The bass is a sine wave with almost nothing above 100Hz in it. Ragga vocals, film dialogue, a rewind, and a lot of low-passed atmosphere. It should sound like two different records at two different tempos that agree on where the bar starts.

Key elements

• The Amen break, choppedSliced at sixteenths and reordered so the snare lands where the original did not. The point of a jungle edit is that you can hear it is the Amen and hear that it is not playing the way it was recorded.
• Half-time sub bassA sine or a filtered Reese moving at a quarter the speed of the drums. It is doing reggae basslines at drum and bass tempo, which is the trick the genre is built on.
• Ghost snaresThe quiet snare hits between the loud ones. They are most of what makes a break sound human, and a jungle pattern with the ghosts removed sounds like a drum machine.
• Time-stretch artefactsThe Akai S950 stretched audio by looping tiny grains, which produced a metallic warble. Producers heard it, liked it, and started stretching things purely to get it.
• Ragga sampleA dancehall vocal, usually one bar of it, dropped in and out. Ragga jungle is the branch where that vocal is the lead rather than an accent.

How to get them

• Slice, do not loopLoad the Amen at its original 136bpm, slice at every sixteenth, then rebuild the bar in a different order. Keep at least the beat 1 kick and the beat 2 snare in place so the ear has an anchor.
• Stretch, do not repitchTime-stretch the break up to your tempo rather than speeding it up, then add a second layer that is repitched. The stretched layer keeps the snare fat and the repitched layer brings the bright top.
• Layer the main snarePut a separate one-shot snare under the break's beat 2 and beat 4 hits, tuned to match. High-pass the ghost hits above 400Hz so they sit behind the main hit rather than competing with it.
• Split the breakRun two copies with a crossover at about 250Hz. Compress the low half hard and leave the top half alone, so you get weight without the hats pumping.
• BassA sine with a short pitch drop, mono, everything above 120Hz filtered out, playing two or four notes a bar. Sidechain it to the break's kick hits only, not to every drum.
• Reversed crashA reversed cymbal into every eight or sixteen bar boundary. It is the cheapest way to make an arrangement of chopped drums read as a song.

Reference points

Remarc, Dillinja, Lemon D, Source Direct, DJ Hype, Congo Natty, Shy FX, and Moving Shadow and Suburban Base as labels. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.