Breakbeat Music - Origins, Techniques and Popular Genres

Breakbeat music includes a range of styles and genres of electronic music whose common characteristic is the use of a non 4/4 drum beat. Syncopation (rhythms that deviate from the standard pattern of regularly-spaced strong and weak beats in a meter) and polyrhythms (the simultaneous sounding of multiple independent rhythms) are common features in breakbeat music.

Breakbeats are found in numerous hip hop, rap, jungle (drum and bass), and hardcore songs as well as other music such as pop music and television commercials. Along with the growth in popularity of breakbeats and the widespread use of digital samplers, companies and independent producers have even begun selling "breakbeat packages" - entire collections of pre-sampled breakbeats for artists to start using in their own compositions.

The origins of breakbeat music can be traced back to the latter part of the 1970s and early 1980s, when early hip-hop disc-jockeys started playing a number of "breaks" (the section of a jazz or funk when the music "breaks" to allow the drummer to play a solo) over and over to use as the basic rhythm track for their songs. A popular technique was to play the same record on two turntables and play the break repeatedly by switching back and forth between the two records (allowing one to play while spinning the second record back to the start of the break). This style was often imitated and became extremely popular in clubs and dance halls.

The "Amen Break," a drum break from The Winstons' song "Amen, Brother" is considered to be most-used break in music today. Its popularity is partly due to the fact that it is easy to "slice" or rearrange parts of the loop using a software or hardware sampler because of the drummer's regularity. Other popular breaks include The 'Horizons' break, which is principally made up of cymbals and splashes, the Led Zeppelin song "When the Levee Breaks" and the Tramen break (also known as the FireFight break).

Since the introduction of digital sampling, it has become much easier to produce and use breakbeats in music. Now, rather than cutting and splicing sections of tape or backspinning two records simultaneously, software can be used to cut, paste, and loop breakbeats automatically. Digital effects processors (such as reverb, time stretching, filters and pitch shifting) can be used to modify the entire beat or even just to individual sounds within the original break. Parts of a given breakbeat can be resampled and blended with others to create new breakbeat patterns.

Nowadays, the term "breakbeat" has become intertwined with the many genres of electronic music in which DJs and producers incorporate "breaks," including big beat, techno, drum and bass, dubstep and many others.