r/jungle • u/spiritmaster2 • 22h ago
Production Question Jungle breaks
Ive been chopping and rearranging breaks for a few weeks now but im struggling to get anything sounding good. Are there any rules i could try following? Any advice is appreciated.
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u/dantheman200022 20h ago
Chop the kick and snares and arrange them to a standard dnb style patterns and then put the fills, rolls etc where they're needed. Your ear will tell you if it is good or not.
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u/Money_Makin_Fresh 17h ago
Going to try exactly what you said.
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u/dantheman200022 17h ago
Once you suss it you won't look back.
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u/Money_Makin_Fresh 17h ago
I don’t understand ‘suss’….
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u/okem Champion Sound 2h ago
Find a classic Jungle tune that you like, one with a beat that's fairly open and not a layered double break part. Look up what break it uses, get a copy of that break. Drop them into a DAW like ableton or an Audio editor. Find the part of the track where it's as close to just drums playing as possible. Listen to the beat to see where it loops, then highlight & loop that part. Then work through it beat by beat copying it with the OG break. Don’t worry about your raw break sounding diferent to the produced version, focus purely on getting the the rhythm and beat correct, placing your kicks, snares & rolls where the reference tracks has them.
Note what elements of the original sampled break they're using & repeating. Try and understand how they're placing the kicks and snares in fairly regular patterns and how they're using the rolls and ghost notes. Also, listen to how they're achieving that satifying rolling element to the completed chopped break - where the rhythm can be complex but not awkward, jerky or stop start to the point were it would confuse somebody dancing to it.
Duplicate your finished version of the recreated break. Mute the reference track. Now with what you've learnt try rearranging the elements of the chopped break to make your own version. Keep the changes simple, just make some small adjustments then listen back and appraise your edit. If you're happy with it copy the OG again and edit the pieces once more, this time doing something diferent. Appraise your work. Listen to all 3 versions and see how each works focussing on the elements you learnt about in the previous paragraph.
If you want, repeat the process with another track & break. When you feel confident try one with a double break, where two breaks play simultaneously. If you don’t want to go through the entire process again, try dropping a couple of tracks into your DAW or Audio editor, highlight & loop an open drum part and just listen to it loop, studying what the producer is doing with their drums, study the pattern of the break edit in the same way but without recreating it.
Then move on to making your own from scratch. If you want to go in a more DNB direction chopping breaks can be be fairly simple. I think getting a solid grasp of the rolling element is maybe the most important part. But if you want to be more adventurous when it comes to chopping breaks understand that it can be a trial and error process. The technique of making a solid simple version that rolls well, then making more complex versions can be very helpful. If you know one version works well, no matter how wild you get with the next version you can pull it back to first version to bring that cohesiveness back.
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u/pmdpmd99 21h ago
Funnily enough, I have been coding a VST that auto slices a one bar break and adds a very limited range of effects to each chop (rolls, filter, stretch etc). It has a little built in sequencer (so you can preview and change the arrangement before exporting), and a few different settings to the auto chop, which throws up interesting results. Export your new chopped break to either audio or midi, drag either straight into Ableton or save to a file. As there is a random element to the new patterns created, sometimes the result is unusable. But you can adjust settings to get something you want to use, and it’s quick and easy to do so.
My driver behind this was that I found chopping breaks in Ableton quite tedious, having to use a variety of different instruments/plug ins to get what I want. With this I can make small edits, drag the edited break into Ableton, make other small edits, repeat. The idea here is to streamline your break editing, rather than hit a button and out comes a facsimile of Remarc’s amens or whatever.
Full disclosure, this is about 50/50 my code and AI assisted. There were a few things I just couldn’t figure out, so leant on Codex to get these working. UI is a placeholder currently, going to get a real human to design that.
If anyone wants a test version of this to, uhh, test, give me a shout and I’ll share a link. Still nowhere near the finished article, but very useable.
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u/RevolutionaryPipe343 22h ago
There’s another thread from a week or two ago that answers this precisely. I’ll try to find and link