THISARTICLEUNDERCONSTRUCTION

About

The Amen Break is a sample from the 1969 song “Amen, Brother” by the funk/soul group The Winstons. Though the song was a B-side release and was not as popular as other songs by the group, in the 1980s the 6-second drum break became famous throughout the breakbeat and jungle genres and has been passed around greatly due to its lack of copyright control and ease of usage.

Origin

The track that the sample comes from, entitled “Amen, Brother”, was a B-side to the more popular “Color Him Father”, which was awarded Golden Record status on July 24, 1969 for selling 1 million copies. The famous drum beat occurs at 1:26 in the song, and is seperated from all other instruments, making it incredibly easy to sample from the song and separate into individual drum beats.

Rise to Popularity

In the late 1980s and early 1990s the development of new genres of electronic music, brought on by the invention of the sampler, allowed for DJs to take parts of songs and CD recordings and mix them with other songs, or loop them and play them back over other instrument samples. The editor of the popular Ultimate Breaks and Beats series of music CDs used by DJs, Louis Flores, placed “Amen, Brother” on one of the discs, but significantly slowed down the now-famous break, so that DJs could more easily loop it across two turntables. Eventually, when samplers became more prevalent in music production, the signature break was ripped from the disc, though a later high-quality rerelease of the original song would later take over.^[1]

Soon, the rapidly growing electronic dance movement created entirely new, seperate genres dedicated to songs created mainly by sampling, such as Breakbeat Hardcore, Jungle, Ragga, and Industrial Hardcore. As the usage of sampling grew, as did the usage and copying of the Amen Break. Through a process known as “chopping”, the individual beats of the break were divided into their own samples, and could be freely permuted into completely different drum rhythms, even to the point of being completely undanceable. Today, the Amen Break, due to its incredibly loose legal protection, is even used in advertisements. The website WhoSampled has over 1400 songs containing the Amen Break.

The popularity of the Amen Break prompted two case studies of its history and rise to fame. The first, by Landon Proctor, was printed onto a vinyl record in 2004 and uploaded to Youtube in 2006. As of 2/9/2015, it has gained over 4,850,000 views (below, left).^[2] The second was an hour-long special on the BBC 1XTRA radio station, recorded on March 6, 2011. Since being placed on Youtube, it has gained over 50,000 views (below, right).^[3]

Notable Usage Examples

Search Interest

External References

^[1]Wikipedia – Amen Break

^[2]Youtube – Video explains the world’s most important 6-sec drum loop

^[3]Youtube – History Of The Amen Break