Amen break

Amen Break waveform

The Amen Break is a sample from the piece Amen, Brother of the soul band The Winstons from 1969. It is a short solo by drummer Gregory C. Coleman in the middle of the song . The break is four bars long, lasts six seconds and is relatively fast for a radio break at around 130 bpm .

The Amen Break is one of the most widely used samples in the history of hip hop and electronic music . The band members were not aware of the use and success of the sample. Singer Richard Lewis Spencer only found out about it in the mid-1990s when someone tried to obtain the rights to the song over the phone.

A crowdfunding campaign started in February 2015 made it possible in November of the same year to present Spencer with a sum of 24,000 US dollars. The creator of the Amen Break , drummer Gregory Coleman, died homeless in 2006.

The powerful and have a relatively dull sound of the drum recording and the catchy, syncopated rhythm make the sample particularly useful to be played in higher speeds, for example by a 33⅓- rpm - record with 45 revolutions per minute is played. The effective speed is then around 175 bpm. Breakbeats and the amen break in particular are the basis of jungle music, from which drum and bass later emerged. Especially at the beginning almost every jungle piece contained the Amen Break in a more or less recognizable form, but it is still used again and again today. The speed of 175 bpm of the faster played break is still the usual tempo in drum and bass.

Notation of the amen break with hi-hat / crash , snare drum , bass drum (top to bottom)

Nowadays the Amen Break is no longer just played faster, but divided into individual short samples that can then be rearranged. The continuous sounding cymbals in particular create an appealing effect. The samples (also independently) be different alienation effects edited and with different pitches (pitches) reproduced. Some of the samples are also combined with other drum samples. Nevertheless, the Amen Break has a high recognition value due to its characteristic sound . The technique described is used in drum and bass and other styles of electronic music for other drum breaks as well. It can be assumed that especially in jungle and drum and bass - but also in other styles such as breakcore - the amen break was used thousands of times.

Web links

• Remix Museum
• whosampled.com
• Nate Harrison: Can I Get An Amen? - Audio installation over the Amen Break (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michail Hengstenberg: cult sample "Amen Break". Four bars for eternity. (No longer available online.) In: einestages.spiegel.de. February 16, 2011, formerly in the original ; accessed on October 20, 2015 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  
2. ↑ "Amen Break": Crowdfunding for the most famous drum beat of all time
3. ↑ The musicians behind the "Amen Break" finally got money for it ( memento of the original from November 22nd, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Noisey / VICE. 
4. ↑ cf. Mark Jonathan Butler: Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic . Indiana University Press, Bloomington 2006, ISBN 0-253-34662-2 , pp. 78-80 . and File: Amen break notation.png for the sentence