Groovin' in G
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Amen Break Mega Instrument 🎹
🕑 Added 2025-06-13 13:35:51 +0000 UTCEvery 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
Comments
George CS
Ah yes! That’s my fault sorry. I used a \ which you can’t do on most things. It’s a bad habit that gets me into trouble on Google drive also!
Helene
This looks great! Just a heads up for Windows users – a couple of files in the 'Amen Break Processing Step By Step' folder contain a ':' in the filename, which Windows doesn't support. I got around this by installing 7-Zip which let me rename the files prior to unzipping. (Inevitably someone will tell me this serves me right for using Windows but hey, not all of us have Apple money ;))
George CS
Nice Egor that's dope you've translated it onto the M8, I just did the same for the Digitakt mk2. I forgot you can trade files between trackers like that! thats actually so cool for starting your project away from the computer. I like the look of the M8 and have heard great things all around but never tried one. I've got so much on these days and am finally settled with Renoise/Digitakt mk2 & Logic. I really got all my bases covered sequencer wise even though i definitly get tempted from time to time! :)
Egor Chemokhonenko
It was a bit challenging to export transposed snares/kicks to samples, but I successfully created an Dirtywave M8 instrument based on your Renoise instrument. I used this sample compiler https://miomoto.de/ynadk/ to achieve notes-per-hit behaviour. Now I cac sketch breaks on-the-go and export it to renoise simply by recording midi from M8 (if instrument keyzones are mapped equally). Wondering what do you think about Dirtywave M8 and have you tried it by yourself?
George CS
Hi Will, great idea. I was messing with the new slicing on the Digitakt mk2. The only way this is possible is by using the grid slicing or even slice feature which has up to 64 slices. The only problem is I'm pretty sure that original instrument has more than 64 slices, I could split it into two. Maybe because you can pitch individual hits or slices so easily on the Digitakt I wouldnt need to key/span any of the hits and just have them all at original pitch. Let me have a look this week as I think its a good way to open these up to even more people. :)
Will Tonna
Love the vid and it got me to pull the trigger on the Pateron 🙏 any thoughts as to best way of translating this to a Digitakt II Preset? Perhaps the slicing engine would make it easier? Or better to just map it to Grid with even spacing? Would love to use thing entirely "in-the-box" 🤤
