Title Tracks Drummer Andrew Black Releases 7″ of Drum Breaks

Musical inspiration and theft often go hand in hand, but most of the time the crimes tend to be immaterial—a lifted chord progression or a borrowed melody. The theft that kicked off AB’s Original Breaks, however, is not the sort of thing that could be explained away as homage.

“I had a laptop stolen from me,” says drummer Andrew Black. “And when I bought a new laptop I decided that since I’m around ProTools so much, I should learn it. So, I started re-tracking all of these drum breaks that I had been playing and cataloging them.”

Black took four of these breaks—minute-and-a-half percussion grooves with minimal instrumentation meant to be sampled by hip-hop artists—and pressed them to a 7” single, dubbing the project AB’s Original Breaks. They’re up-tempo and lightly funky, the kind of thing that might have been snatched out of the middle of a James Brown tune. “I sit down and I try to play them and see if it feels like people would want to move to it,” says Black. “I like to play at about the speed of the human heartbeat—90 bpm. A lot of my favorite go-go is at about 90-95 bpm.”
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