The Most Sampled Song Ever

Some additional thoughts/corrections: 1) I'm not enough on an expert on the history of UK dance music to speak with authority on the difference between DnB and Jungle, but to the best of my understanding they are, at minimum, very closely overlapping scenes. 2) I think, in the Take A Deep Breath clip, the added snares are all the one from beat 2, rather than alternating beats 2 and 4 like my pointing may have implied. That was more to minimize the visual chaos caused by whipping my hand back and forth around the bar. 3) To be clear, when I say I found the golden ratio theory in a bunch of articles, I don't mean, like, academic scholarship. I mean the sorts of things that come up near the tops of google searches. Music academics, for the most part, know better than that. 4) On that, one important thing to note is that, to the extent that the golden ratio actually lines up with the waveform at all, it's entirely because the waveform they used was 13 beats long. 13 is a Fibonacci number, so if you do your golden rectangle thing, you'll wind up finding either the 5th or 8th beat, depending on which side you look from. But importantly, the same thing would happen with any waveform of any clip containing 13 beats played at a consistent meter. Again, it's nonsense. 5) I'm pretty sure the reason most songs sample the second bar of the break is that the first bar has a little bit of bleed-over from the horns. Bar 2 is almost identical but it's easy to get a clean cut with no other instruments getting in the way. 6) One thing to note about this reduction methodology is that it's extremely subjective, and the steps you take to get from a basic beat to a final one are up to you. For example, I could have chosen to push back the kicks on beat 3 first, and then doubled up all my kicks later. The particular order I used was a simplified version of the one Dr. Hein presented, and I think it's a solid one, but that doesn't mean it's the only way to do this. 7) I used 8-bit's terminology for this video, but in the future I think I might start calling the beat layer the "anchor layer" instead, to avoid confusion between it and references to specific beat numbers. Dunno, still mulling it over. 8) For what it's worth, in the slowed-down double-kick that I played to demonstrate timing fluctuations, the durations of the two kicks have about a 3:2 ratio, mostly a result of the second one being pretty far behind the quantized 16th it's "supposed" to be hitting on. If you're having trouble hearing it, don't worry, even at that speed it's not that noticeable. 9) I want to stress that I understand that not only is copyright legally and ethically complicated in general, it becomes even more complicated in the realm of sampling, for a bunch of reasons. I'm not necessarily convinced that any particular artist who sampled the break necessarily owed Coleman money for it, but collectively, the end result seems transparently unjust. I don't know for sure what system I would want in place that would have prevented it, I just know that something should have. (All this is to say that maybe it was a bit harsh to use a drawing of an elephant thief to represent people not paying licensing fees, but also I would argue that, taken in total, a wrong was certainly committed against Coleman, and I don't really have a better drawing to represent that.)

Imagine basically playing the most important 6 seconds of drumming in human history, and then dying penniless not even knowing what really happened when you were drumming that day. Mad respect to Coleman.

You didn't touch on one of the huge reasons why the break has been sampled so much. The way the break is isolated on amen, brother. If you listen to the song when the break happens every other instrument disappears leaving only the drums. Not only that but there is little to no reverb on the drum track. It is, for a recording of that time, extremely crisp. I claim that if the break would have heavy reverb or if there would be bassline or other instruments behind it it wouldn't have become such an ubiqituous sample. The fact that it is so isolated, so crisp makes it a break which can be thrown into almost any and every track and you can make it work. The crispness allows you to add effects or other necessary elements to make the original recording fit the song you are working on. The break is basically a blank canvas onto which you can paint your own stuff. I said it once and Ill say it again. If the break would have had any other instrumentation on the background or if it would have had heavy reverb it would not have become such an ubiqitious sample. It is the clarity and crispness of the recording which is a major part of its success, not discounting the groove of it of course.

I feel like you could probably do an entire video on the opening theme from Futurama

Even the rhythmically stripped down versions of the break are pretty neat in of themselves.

The echoing snares are commonly called "ghost snares" in dnb production. They're the glue that holds the breakbeat together and make a beat go from seeming like a collection of separate hits to a galloping groove. Whenever you wanna sample a drum recording to chop up, looking for a ghost snare is always good, it's pretty hard to get replicate the same kind of effect by putting effects/filters/changing the volume of the main snare.

As soon as I saw the title in the notification i knew this video was going to be about the amen break

When you played the Amen Break my mind was launched backward into my childhood. I'm pretty sure Power Puff Girls used to play the break by itself over every fight scene

That bit at the end was a nice touch. As a drummer myself I've had to cope with the realities of my instrument to which my passion has been poured into being seen as replaceable, the imperfections of play being taken out of many songs via quantisation or even just having a machine do my part for me, something liable to get even worse once more AI applications to music come into being. Despite the fact that most guitarists and singers will tell you finding one of us to join for the band is typically the hardest spot to fill! Drums don't have the same sort of timbre and tonality of other instruments, if you don't want a drummer you can find a way around it for a lot of styles of music. But there was only one GC Coleman. And there only ever will be, just as there only ever had been one of any musician you listen to.

The Amen Break should have been included on this gold disc, which was shot into space with the Voyager probe.

I think another really important aspect is that it sounds good at pretty much any tempo. Most drum beats are going to have a range of BPM they play well at, but I've made stuff with the amen break all the way between 80 and 200 bpm and it still sounds amazing. I think using rides instead of hihats means that at low speeds, there isn't any dead air, but at high speeds the hits aren't coming too fast to process.

It's already a pretty great beat but it's amazing how the sound of that specific recording makes it just magical. Dude created entire music cultures with just one singular drum solo like it cannot be put into words how much of an amazingly impossible thing is to even happen at all. Really sad for how he didn't even get any recognition for it in life, Coleman really desrved better.

When I think of the Amen Break my mind goes to the 2005-ish era when Sega's sound team used it for what felt like EVERY Sonic song. It's like "yeah that's a cool sample but you all do realize there are other drum beats too, right?"

3:24 Man, I felt that groan, all the way down in my core.

I wish you went into the tambre a bit more. Because I think that's exactly what makes it work so well. The snare getting the perfect rimshot crack and the great tone of the ping it has cuts through everything. The ride is classic and cuts. The kick is dry and hits nice around 100hz. Everything just makes it sound choice at any pitch or speed. I have a patch of it on my jacket.

THANK YOU for the golden-ratio bit. I visitied a seminar and wrote an entire paper about this topic (golden ratio in ancient architecture in my case) in school and I can tell you that it's overrated af

At least with the Funky Drummer break, that drummer got respect while he was still alive (and Garbage decided that while they could've very well sampled him, it wasn't much more to actually hire him, since he was local to them, and he did some session work for them).

I'm no Coleman... but I'm a drummer and I play this kind of syncopated stuff just... out of my head...for intuitive fun. And now I feel like someone just dissected my brain. This is a fascinating story in drum lore about a beat that changed the world. Thanks for telling it! I am also a video editor... and I totally noticed how well you synchronized the high speed drawing with your narration... and when the sped up video matched the notes of the audio as you wrote them...landing perfectly on the kick drum notes... omg... chef kiss to the editor!

My personal conclusion for the Amen Break being so popular is due to the fact the whole break is just an entire continuous flow state. Everything is just incredibly smooth, and I'd argue that most drummers aspire to be that flawlessly smooth almost all the time. Its potential for infinite recombination and looping make the drum break so consistently useful for decades after its initial recording. And yes, I'm glad you mentioned the three Ts of the sample, because I think the distinct sound of the break from performance to recording made it exceptionally unique because the distinct early record sound added a level of detail that most other samples inspired by the Amen Break try to replicate, and that would be the sound of the record itself. I'll touch on the idea of a "lo-fi" aesthetic takes hold here, but I'm actually more interested in how the drums, for lack of better description, are kinda distorted, helped in part by the record noise and the mixing/recording process that put the song on the record in the first place. Those early microphone recording setups could only do so much, I'd imagine, so that's why we ended up with this sorta tubby but tight drum sound that is ripe with enough pleasing saturation and noise that allows producers of today to twist and distort it further. It's nigh impossible to break the Amen Break.

What's really sad is that G.C Coleman never received any royalties for the sample, and he was homeless when he died. He got ripped off badly.