Freesound Forums

https://www.audiogen.co/ using this site to generate "original" breakbeats as good breakbeats are hard to find and when I search Freesound for "breakbeat" half the sounds are Amens or Addictive Drums. I'm not going to upload any to Freesound of course but I plan on making some music tracks with them. I know technically AI is stealing various audio clips but I mean so is using the Amen Break and other samples. And due to it being AI it tends to generate some odd fills and stuff that make my brain feel tingly, and nobody in their right mind would do if they were recording a break they actually expected people to use. So what do you think?

Also I will try to start uploading some more modular sounds in the future. Just making drum sounds isn't my strong suit

Ragnar59 wrote:
So what do you think?

https://freesound.org/search/?q=MusicGen+HuggingFace

yeah, MusicGen actually produces a clip of a real song if you give it "breakbeat" though, Audiogen gives you just the drums and maybe a little bit of other instruments, just like an isolated drum break off a record

https://m.soundcloud.com/supergrandmatales324/carrageenan

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1X70L-fF24Yxg_Pyq2is3gURF2r-uKb-E/view?usp=drivesdk

this one is a little more organized but not really lol

Ragnar59 wrote:
... MusicGen actually produces a clip of a real song if you give it "breakbeat" though ...

If you specify something like "Percussion drums only" in MusicGen, that should exclude it adding melody.

I've used AI to make a few beats. Amper Studio was great at it, and let you customize the entire drum kit including drum models, head types, mic placement, etc. Its output was indistinguishable from real drum loops played by a person on a kit. But then, like all good things, it got bought out by another company, then got ruined, then disappeared entirely.
I got disappointing results from AIVA, MusicGen, and the rest.

The most streamlined way to do it yourself would be to just download beats you like and then beat-slice and edit them yourself in a DAW. If you want to go further, and learn how to create them from scratch, you can try this:

1. Locate free percussion MIDI (the midi_man archive alone has about 900,000)
2. Put the MIDIs on a track in a DAW like Reaper, FL Studio, etc.
3. Load some different drum kits onto that track. I can recommend DSK DrumZ MachineZ for electronic drums, and either MT-Power Drum Kit, MK Drums, or OCK (Organic Calfskin Kit). They're all free.
4. Turn one kit on at a time, cycle through its sounds, and see how it responds to the MIDI.
5. When you have a set of kit+MIDI that you like, render a big batch of stuff!

Once you've looked at and heard enough drum patterns, you'll have enough experience to be able to write your own. That'll be the part where you learn to write breakbeats or adapt existing beats into that format. Then you have the DAW playing them, retain the ability to adjust them (as opposed to having them as static pre-rendered samples), and know the tempo and feel of the material innately, all of which greatly helps you know how to chop it up to make something funky.

Making good breakbeats also involves a lot of other skills such as beat/wave slicing, riding volume faders and gate controls, mixing and matching samples to get just the right feel, etc. Most of those techniques are most applicable in a live or improv setting, but you will still want to know how they feel and sound so you can pick them out when others do them. Beat slicing is king. Almost all the oldschool breakbeats were homemade, and even the ones that used the "Amen" break, "Yeah! Woo!" break, etc. still relied heavily on slicing and rearranging the beat.

tl;dr: Instead of saying "making drum sounds isn't my strong suit", find a good method for making drum sounds so that it becomes your strong suit. Make it fun and exciting to do. If you just view it as work or as a problem in the way, it'll almost never happen.

I'm happy to make a video about this if it's unclear.

Timbre wrote:

Ragnar59 wrote:
... MusicGen actually produces a clip of a real song if you give it "breakbeat" though ...

If you specify something like "Percussion drums only" in MusicGen, that should exclude it adding melody.

I couldn't get MusicGen to do it except when using the exact string "percussion drums only". So I'm unsure if there's a way to do something like "rock'n'roll drums only" and have it make only rock style drums. It also takes a small eternity to make drum stems and I think the OP would probably like to finish the song before they get too old.

EDIT: I kept at it, and will say that your MusicGen prompt did eventually yield some interesting results - good enough for fills or interludes in a serious mix, maybe even better than that if I kept asking it for more material. I'll take back the "I got disappointing results from MusicGen" part of my above post.

EDIT 2: Okay the last one finally rendered and is quite good! Maybe MusicGen with your prompt is a feasible method after all. Now I just have to find ideal BPM values for these. I'll try generating one more, specify a bpm, and see if it works. (Nope, at least not with my prompt of "percussion drums only 120bpm".)

MVSep and other audio separation sites might also work on MusicGen material and allow us to extract usable drum loops. I've used MVSep to great effect in the past, for everything from pop music stems to extracting melodies from old TV commercials to chiptune music. Demucs3 Model B was good and I think they now have a v4 that's even better.

strangehorizon wrote:
I've used AI to make a few beats. Amper Studio was great at it, and let you customize the entire drum kit including drum models, head types, mic placement, etc. Its output was indistinguishable from real drum loops played by a person on a kit. But then, like all good things, it got bought out by another company, then got ruined, then disappeared entirely.
I got disappointing results from AIVA, MusicGen, and the rest.

The most streamlined way to do it yourself would be to just download beats you like and then beat-slice and edit them yourself in a DAW. If you want to go further, and learn how to create them from scratch, you can try this:

1. Locate free percussion MIDI (the midi_man archive alone has about 900,000)
2. Put the MIDIs on a track in a DAW like Reaper, FL Studio, etc.
3. Load some different drum kits onto that track. I can recommend DSK DrumZ MachineZ for electronic drums, and either MT-Power Drum Kit, MK Drums, or OCK (Organic Calfskin Kit). They're all free.
4. Turn one kit on at a time, cycle through its sounds, and see how it responds to the MIDI.
5. When you have a set of kit+MIDI that you like, render a big batch of stuff!

Once you've looked at and heard enough drum patterns, you'll have enough experience to be able to write your own. That'll be the part where you learn to write breakbeats or adapt existing beats into that format. Then you have the DAW playing them, retain the ability to adjust them (as opposed to having them as static pre-rendered samples), and know the tempo and feel of the material innately, all of which greatly helps you know how to chop it up to make something funky.

Making good breakbeats also involves a lot of other skills such as beat/wave slicing, riding volume faders and gate controls, mixing and matching samples to get just the right feel, etc. Most of those techniques are most applicable in a live or improv setting, but you will still want to know how they feel and sound so you can pick them out when others do them. Beat slicing is king. Almost all the oldschool breakbeats were homemade, and even the ones that used the "Amen" break, "Yeah! Woo!" break, etc. still relied heavily on slicing and rearranging the beat.

tl;dr: Instead of saying "making drum sounds isn't my strong suit", find a good method for making drum sounds so that it becomes your strong suit. Make it fun and exciting to do. If you just view it as work or as a problem in the way, it'll almost never happen.

I'm happy to make a video about this if it's unclear.

by "making drums isn't my strong suit", I meant synesthesizing drum machine sounds from scratch in a modular synth. Which obviously has different applications than breakbeats

We've still given you two solid suggestions: Timbre's suggestion of MusicGen prompts such as "percussion drums only" to generate new loops which have only drums, and my suggestion of using MVsep.com to extract drum loops from existing audio (including MusicGen/AI stuff).

I've also been editing and uploading MusicGen drum loops, some of which are beat-sliced, but none of which are breakbeat. Don't know what prompt to feed it, if any, to get it to make that.

There are plenty of modules that can dynamically cut and rearrange loops to make live breakbeats. If you're doing software modular like VCV Rack, have a poke around their library. Any kind of interesting gate (especially trance gates), arpeggiator, CV sequencer, loop slicer, granulator, etc. could be useful in a modular breakbeat endeavor.