loading . . . Amen break listening guide In Advanced Pop Transcription class, we are entering the part of the semester where we turn our focus away from notes and rhythms and toward sound. One of the most important sounds in the past five decades of dance and hip-hop is the Amen break. In this post, I give context for the break and highlight some noteworthy usages over the past four decades.
### Wings Over Jordan Choir – “Amen Amen Amen” (1953)
The story begins with a traditional hymn that’s familiar to choral singers as a vocal warmup. I have seen it credited to Jester Hairston, but it’s unclear whether it’s his original composition, or whether he arranged it from a folkloric source.
### The Impressions – “Amen” (1964)
The song got a boost in popularity when The Impressions recorded it for the soundtrack to the Sidney Poitier film Lilies of the Field.
### The Winstons – “Amen, Brother” (1969)
The Winstons included an instrumental arrangement of “Amen” on the B-side of their single release, “Color Him Father.” They may have been inspired to do the song when they played as a backing band for the Impressions. The famous drum break comes at 1:26. The band broke up the following year.
### Salt-N-Pepa – “I Desire” (1986)
Hip-hop producers began sampling the Amen break in 1986, after Breakbeat Lenny included it on the first volume of Ultimate Breaks and Beats, helpfully slowed to a more hip-hop friendly tempo. This Salt-N-Pepa banger isn’t the first song to use the Amen, but it’s a great one. Spinderella layers some other classic tracks on there too, like the opening drum hit from “Walk This Way” by Aerosmith.
### Mantronix – “King of the Beats” (1988)
This recombinant masterpiece includes samples of 13 different songs and has itself been sampled hundreds of times. For example, J Dilla sampled that opening siren so many times that now it’s known as the Dilla siren.
### NWA – “Straight Outta Compton” (1988)
If you only know Ice Cube from family-friendly comedy movies, it may be difficult to imagine how terrified white people were of him back in the late 1980s.
### DJ Zinc – “Super Sharp Shooter” (1995)
While hip-hop producers prefer the Amen slowed down, UK junglists began exploring the possibilities of speeding it up, slicing it, and rearranging the pieces. They were especially drawn to the more complex syncopation in the back half of the break. If you want to try this kind of chopping yourself, load the break onto several pads/keys of your sampler, with the sample start set to a different location on each pad/key. Then record yourself improvising until you get something good.
### Aphex Twin – “Girl/Boy Song” (1996)
British DJs and producers quickly entered an arms race to see who could chop the Amen in the most unpredictable and hectic way. Aphex Twin slices it finely, reverses it, and does all kinds of other manipulation, all set at a stressful 168 BPM. The fake classical strings are an amusing touch.
### Squarepusher – “Come On My Selector” (1997)
This is about as extreme as the drum n bass aesthetic gets. The tempo is an absurd 190 BPM. It sounds like a cartoon character having a seizure.
### Futurama theme (1999)
I assume that Christopher Tyng used the Amen as a reference to the futuristic sound of UK breakbeat genres.
### Lupe Fiasco – “Streets On Fire” (2007)
A throwback to the slowed down Amen samples of 80s hip-hop. Though this was recorded many years before the Covid pandemic, it evokes the March 2020 feeling uncannily well.
### Tyler, The Creator – “Pigs” (2013)
This is the slowest Amen sample I have ever heard. The lyrics are too harsh for my middle-aged ears, but I love the album cover.
### Amen Andrews – “Amen HQ” (2014)
The producer Luke Vibert is so Amen-obsessed that he has an alter ego whose music uses nothing but.
### 100 gecs – “gec 2 U” (2019)
This shows that you don’t have to use Squarepusher tempos to give your listeners information overload. It feels like listening to every dance and hip-hop genre at once. It’s a bit too ADHD even for my college-aged students.
### Pinkpantheress – “Illegal (Nia Archives Remix)” (2025)
The Amen has been used in a dozens of officially released tracks this year alone, with no sign of slowing down. I happen to like this one.
### Why do people use this beat so much?
There have been other breakbeats that appeal to producers across many styles and eras – the Funky Drummer, Think, Impeach the President, Cold Sweat, Synthetic Substitution, Soul Pride, Ashley’s Roachclip, and so on. But none of them have saturated dance and hip-hop the way the Amen break has. Why? At this point, some of it is just tradition: you sample the Amen break because everyone else does. But why did it get started?
One factor is just the sound of the drums. Winstons drummer Gregory Coleman hits hard, but with subtlety. Each time he hits the ride cymbal, he gets a slightly different pitch, a slightly different velocity. The same is true with the snares. He’s not just pounding out a beat, it’s practically a melody. The tape is heavily saturated, bringing out the upper overtones, and the sound is incredibly loud and present.
The rhythm pattern is compelling too. You can understand it in terms of tresillo rhythms displaced by different amounts that are overlaid on a basic R&B backbeat. Click the image below to download a MuseScore file that lays this idea out in detail.
The most exciting part of this groove is in the second half of the third bar and the fourth bar. Coleman delays the second backbeat in the third and fourth bars, omits the first kick in the fourth bar, adds an unexpected snare on the weakest possible sixteenth note subdivision of the fourth bar, and also throws an unexpected crash on one of the weak eighth note subdivisions of that bar. The feeling is of the drums being pushed back, tumbling over themselves, and exploding. It’s an extraordinary rhythm, and it never gets old.
So far I have only been talking about the rhythms that you can represent in music notation. But Coleman’s microtiming matters too. He keeps very steady time, but there’s some human variation there, and it affects your experience of the groove. The base tempo is about 138 BPM, but at the sixteenth note level, Coleman ranges from about 120 to about 165. Here’s a tempo map:
Here, I’ve zoomed in on the first bar to show Coleman’s deviation from the metronomic sixteenth note grid.
I can continue to describe the microstructure of the groove, but I won’t really be explaining anything. Ultimately, the only explanation is that it sounds incredible, and it continues to sound incredible when sped up, slowed down, resequenced and processed in a huge variety of ways. The best way to understand it is to listen to it, and even better, to try looping and chopping it yourself.
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### _Related_ https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2025/amen-break-listening-guide/
