Breakbeat BPM

How fast, and who says so

Breakbeat is a wide family: the range runs 110–175 BPM, and the tempos producers build at sit all over it:

• Wikipedia, Breakbeat: 110–175 BPM
• Native Instruments, How to make breakbeat music: builds one break at 113.93 BPM and a hardcore one at 155

The groove on this page

Breakbeat is music built on a drum break: a bar or two where a funk or soul band drops out and the drummer plays alone, sampled, chopped and replayed. Instead of a kick on every beat it has the shape of that drummer: kick on the one and just after it, snare on two and four, quiet ghost notes around the snare. The groove here keeps that shape at 134, the tempo of club breaks, with a 54 % swing that puts every second 16th about 9 ms late. The tempo range is wide because the same break moves: left near its record's tempo for hip-hop, pitched up to 155 for hardcore, as Native Instruments' tutorial does with both. Move it with − and +, from 80 to 205: at 90 it sits where hip-hop takes a break, at 140 where breaks meets hardcore.

On this page: the app's Starter kit at 134 BPM, swing 54 %.

Delay and LFO values

A delay in time with the track repeats once per note value: a quarter note lasts 60,000 divided by the BPM, in milliseconds. Dotted is one and a half times that, triplet two thirds. An LFO synced to a note value cycles at 1,000 divided by those milliseconds, in Hz. The table follows the tempo above: − and + move it, and so does a tempo you tap.

Genres near this tempo

• Dubstep: 135–142 BPM
• Trance: 130–150 BPM
• Psytrance: 138–148 BPM
• Hardstyle: about 150 BPM

All twenty genres on one axis, with 134 BPM marked: the BPM chart.

Breakbeat drum pattern

Bar 1: kick on 1 and the and of 1, again on the and of 3; snare on 2 and 4, ghosts just before and after the third beat; a hat on every eighth. Bar 2 adds a kick on the e of 4 and a last ghost that pulls into the next bar. To program breakbeat drums from scratch, keep the snare on two and four and move everything else: UJAM's guide (2021) gives the same skeleton, kick on 1, snare on 2 and 4, and says the more syncopation, the more drive. Put ghost notes at about a third of the snare's velocity and a little swing on the 16ths.

To chop a real break instead: set the sample to the project tempo, slice it on every eighth or 16th, and reorder the slices, keeping a snare on two and four so the floor can follow. For a breakbeat in MIDI, copy the two grids into a piano roll step by step, kick on C1 (36), snare on D1 (38), hat on F♯1 (42), ghost notes at a third of the snare's velocity. To turn your own hummed line into notes over it, hum to MIDI.

Breakbeat BPM by style

The edges come from Wikipedia (110 to 175 for the family, big beat's 1997 peak), Sample Focus (2-step 130 to 138, DnB 172 to 176, breakcore 180 to 240) and Native Instruments (hardcore at 155); Google's summary of the guides puts dariacore at 150 to 180. Club breaks, the genre a DJ means by breaks, mostly sit at 130 to 138. The roots are partly American: electro and Miami bass in the early 1980s, from Afrika Bambaataa to 2 Live Crew, ran on broken drum-machine beats before UK rave sped breaks up. Neighbours: UK garage, drum and bass, hip-hop.

Breakbeat examples: the Amen and the other famous breaks

The Amen break is four bars from The Winstons' "Amen, Brother" (1969), played by Gregory Coleman: about 136 BPM and seven seconds long. Which record sampled it first is argued: Salt-N-Pepa's "I Desire" (1986) is usually named, Simple Wikipedia credits Mantronix's "King of the Beats" (1988), the record that showed how to chop it. Jungle and drum and bass were built on it in the early 1990s. The band was never paid for it; a 2015 GoFundMe raised about £24,000 for Richard L. Spencer, who held the copyright (BBC, November 2015). Played at 170 instead of 136, the Amen runs 25 % faster, and on a sampler without time-stretch it also rises 3.9 semitones, part of jungle's sound.

The other breaks most often sampled, as Wikipedia lists them: James Brown's "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose" (1969) and "Funky Drummer" (1970, Clyde Stubblefield on drums), Lyn Collins' "Think (About It)" (1972), and the Incredible Bongo Band's "Apache" (1973).

A break from a record is still that record: released commercially, it needs clearing, or use a royalty-free break (UJAM). Sample packs have sold the Amen without permission; Zero-G withdrew its copy from a jungle construction kit (Simple Wikipedia).

Break beat, breaks and broken beat: the words

• What is a break in DJing? The bars where the band stops and the drums play alone. From 1973 DJ Kool Herc played two copies of the same record in the Bronx and switched between them to make the break last, and hip-hop grew out of it.
• Break beat or breakbeat is that drum rhythm, sampled or played; breaks is the dance genre built on it.
• Is breakbeat a form of drum and bass? The other way round: breakbeat hardcore sped up into jungle, and jungle became drum and bass.
• Broken beat is something else: a West London style of the late 1990s, jazz and soul over shuffled, off-grid house drums.
• What BPM are hip-hop beats? 85 to 95 on a classic break (hip-hop BPM); trap is written at 130 to 176 and felt at half.
• What genre is 130 BPM? Club breaks, UK garage, techno and the slow end of trance.

Then make something of it

The door opens Brumm, a club track with a beat and a bass, with this groove's low end in it. The app runs between 90 and 150 BPM, so a tempo outside goes in at half or double, or at the nearest end when neither fits. No account, no upload: it travels inside the link. Hum a line over it, and it becomes an instrument.

Nothing is recorded: no microphone, only your taps, counted in the browser. The groove's sounds are the app's own samples, fetched when you tap Play. How the site counts visits.