Guides›Drum breaks

How to chop a drum break

Where to cut, how to stop the clicks, and how to rearrange the pieces into a pattern that was never played.

Chopping a break means cutting it into pieces at the drum hits, then replaying those pieces in an order the drummer never played. It is how one four-bar performance becomes twenty different patterns.

1.Find the tempo first

Everything downstream depends on this. If your session sits at the wrong tempo relative to the break, every cut lands slightly out of place and the whole thing fights you.

If the file is labelled with its tempo, match your session to it and you are done. If it is not, use your DAW tempo detection, then check it by ear across eight bars. Detection is usually right, and occasionally out by exactly double or half, which is obvious the moment you listen.

This is the argument for buying breaks with the BPM in the filename. Every break in the No Face, No Case drum break kit is labelled, so step one takes no guessing at all.

2.Where to cut

• Cut on the transient, not before it. The transient is the sharp spike at the start of a hit. Your cut wants to land at the foot of that spike. Cut early and you get a moment of silence before the hit. Cut late and you shave off the attack, which is what makes chops sound weak.
• Zoom in further than feels necessary. At normal zoom you are placing cuts within maybe ten milliseconds. Zoom until you can see individual waveform cycles and that becomes sub-millisecond.
• Cut at a zero crossing. That is where the waveform passes through the centre line. Cut anywhere else and the audio starts mid-cycle, and that jump is what produces a click. Most DAWs snap to zero crossings if you ask. Turn it on.

3.Killing clicks

Three fixes, in the order worth trying.

1. A tiny fade. One or two milliseconds at the start and end of every chop. Short enough that you cannot hear it, long enough to stop the discontinuity.
2. Move the cut. If a fade does not fix it, the cut is in the wrong place. Nudge it to the nearest zero crossing.
3. Overlap slightly. Let each chop run a few milliseconds into the next and crossfade. Useful when the room tail on one hit is being cut off abruptly.

4.How many pieces

Fewer than people expect.

Cut at every kick and snare and you have enough to rearrange almost anything. That is typically eight to sixteen pieces from a two-bar break.

Cut at every single hit, hats included, and you have total control and an unusable amount of material. Most producers who work this way end up using six of forty pieces.

Start at kicks and snares. Go finer only where you need to.

5.Rearranging

This is the actual craft, and there are only a few moves.

• Move the snare. Take the snare from beat three and put it on the second sixteenth instead. The whole pattern leans differently. This one change does more than any other.
• Repeat a piece. Play one chop twice where the original played it once. Instant fill.
• Leave gaps. Silence is a rhythmic choice. Removing a hit draws more attention than adding one.
• Play it backwards. Not the whole thing, one piece. A reversed snare going into a downbeat is a standard move because it works.
• Take the last bar from somewhere else. Chop two breaks, use one for bars one to three and the other for bar four. The change in room tone at the turnaround sounds deliberate.

A practical order of work

1. Set the session tempo to the break.
2. Cut at every kick and snare, snapping to zero crossings.
3. Fade every piece by a millisecond or two at both ends.
4. Map the pieces across your sampler or pads in the order they occurred.
5. Play the original pattern back to confirm nothing clicks.
6. Only then start moving things.