Amen Break Mega Instrument 🎹 (Patreon)

Every now and again I get inspired to do something entirely tedious to set up but completely epic once it's done! 😊

I preset to you my Amen Mega Break Chopping Instrument. 🥷

I did a post a while ago referencing the Sully Renoise production video where I talked about the old school method of setting up your drums as one big program, just like you would on old hardware sampler like the Akai S1000. https://www.patreon.com/posts/sully-renoise-126273081

Well today, I've taken this idea a step further and created my ultimate Amen break chopping instrument. I processed the break through my hardware, chopped it up into perfect slices, added 'spanned' long hits so they can be pitched, mono reverb hits, Photek style snare rattles, delayed fx, reverse whips & Akai s1000 time-stretch FX.

This is an absolute beast of an instrument which I can wait to get back in the studio next week and play with. I also would love to do a Patreon competition with a feedback stream on tracks made with this instrument. 🏆

Processing

The purpose of the processing for this break was to give you the perfect starting template for an Amen break. I didn’t want to go too far into distortion, compression, bit reduction or anything like that as these can all be added to your own taste.

Instead, I’ve gone for some loudness & dirt through clipping & pitching +/-12st into the Akai, then some brightness and warmth through the Topaz mixer + EQ. The compression at the end is very subtle and just adds a bit of glue.  

Amen Processing:

• Mono Amen to the left side only.
• Chop Amen to the last two bars. 
• Pitch the Amen + 12st in Renoise and sample into the Akai S1000 clipping the input slightly. Then pitch back down in the Akai.
• Resample through the Topaz 14:4 mixer with slight EQ boost to top/low end.
• Very subtle compression adding a little more energy & glue to the break.  
• Pitch up to 168 BPM in Renoise. The purpose of this BPM is to be flexible for everyone to use, as it’s at the lower end of Jungle/dnb speeds. You can pitch +/- the whole instrument to adapt it to different project tempos from here. 

Amen FX & Slicing

• Slice the Amen into long sections.
• Include the shuffles & hats as individual chops as they're also handy.
• Use manual ping-pong loops with fades and amp ADSR to extend the kicks & snares.
• Mono reverb kick & snares.
• Photek style snare rattles - https://www.patreon.com/posts/photek-snare-103406869
• Reverse snares/kicks and crashes with fades at the end to make them smoother.
• Time-stretched hits in Akai s1000.
• Few rhythmic delayed snare hits with fitlers + gated snare roll.

Finally I put the whole instrument together in Renoise. Matched the levels where needed, spanned certain hits up and down the keyboard, exported sfz & converted using translator 7 to Ableton, Bitwig & Logic formats.

If there's any problems please let me know and we can troubleshoot next week as i'm away for the weekend now. Going to enjoy some sun with a few mates near Reading! ☀️

Big ups everyone, excited to hear what you make with this :)

George