Resequencing the Funky Drummer’s DNA

The most sampled recording in history is (probably) the Funky Drummer loop from James Brown’s song “The Funky Drummer Parts One And Two.” Here I go deeper into how this sample can be reworked into new music. DJs call this practice chopping a sample. It’s much easier to chop samples with computers than with hardware samplers and turntables.

To take a sample, the first step is to extract it as a separate audio file. I like to use a program called Transcribe for this purpose. Once I have a sample, my preferred tools for remixing are Recycle, which slices a sample into individually-manipulable pieces, and Reason’s Dr Rex loop player, for reshuffling and resequencing the slices, changing the key, adding effects and doing further transformation.

Here’s the Funky Drummer loop as seen in Recycle. Click through to see it bigger.

Here’s a graphic I made showing how you hear the loop as it’s played repetitively.

Here’s how the Funky Drummer loop looks in the Reason loop player and sequencer. The blue thing is the loop player itself, where you can add effects like filter sweeps and pitch shifting. Below, the sequencer shows eight repetitions of the loop, forming an eight-bar phrase, a metaloop.

Here’s the view inside one of the colored boxes in the sequencer, a single iteration of the loop.

Each red brick is a slice, a rhythmic event, a drum or cymbal hit. There are sixteen of them in this loop. Reason follows the dance music convention of thinking of a bar as sixteen sixteenth notes, so it considers the Funky Drummer loop to be one bar long. This convention makes me crazy; I prefer to think of it as two bars of eight eighth notes each. However you want to count it, musicians usually describe this as a sixteenth note feel. Hear the loop:

[audio:http://ethanhein.com/music/Funky_Drummer_loop.mp3]

By removing every other slice of the loop, you change the groove from a sixteenth note feel to a more spacious eighth note feel. The silences have as much presence as the drum hits.

Here’s how the loop sounds in eighth notes.

[audio:http://ethanhein.com/music/Funky_Drummer_8th_notes.mp3]

You don’t need to play the slices of a loop in their original order. Reason lets you play the slices in any order at all. Here’s the Funky Drummer loop completely randomized:

I’m not posting an mp3 of this because it sounds terrible, but sometimes randomizing the slices of a sample can give unexpectedly delightful results. You get especially interesting sounds when you map the MIDI data from one loop to the audio from a different one. You can also try new combinations by playing the slices from a keyboard or other MIDI controller. The slices automatically map to the chromatic scale, so slice one is the lowest C on the keyboard, slice two is C sharp, slice three is D and so on.

The loop player gets even more interesting when you supply it with a melodic phrase. By playing pieces of the melody in different orders and shifting the individual notes up and down, you can effortlessly create new melodies from any existing sample. The combinatorial possibilities are dizzying.

I see a strong analogy between shuffling the pieces of a sample to create new music and shuffling DNA letters to create new organisms. In biological evolution, all new organisms come about by the semi-accidental reshuffling of existing organisms’ genomes. So, for instance, mutations can happen when a sequence of DNA gets repeated accidentally during copying:

I believe that new music comes about this way too. Before software like Reason and Recycle, the reshuffling of musical memes happened exclusively in musicians’ minds, or later on paper. The software extends the power of our recombinational imaginations to recorded music, not just imaginary music. Powerful stuff!