20 Minute Documentary About 6 Seconds of Music.

[K]

That link is to a cute little documentary about six seconds of drum beat known as the Amen Break. As soon as you hear the six seconds it talks about you will recognise it. To summarise, in the late sixties a funk soul group released a single, The B-Side of which contained a clean six seconds of drums. With the invent of the sampler and the rise of the hip-hop culture those six seconds would be revisited hundreds of times and spawn entire genres of music. It's pretty fascinating. It's also an interesting commentary on over protection of intellectual properties and copyright in general.

Yeah, it's pretty cool.

[Lowerdeck]

Interesting. Though I'm going to assume that much of the sampling done from that one six second bit is just coincidence, or sampling based off other songs which were samples in themselves.

[METALMAN]

That was good. That is the sort of thing my dad would find interesting.

I shall email it to him.

[EWFan]

Seen it before, pretty interesting. I even sampled this for one of my tracks even before I knew the history behind it.

[wolves]

When I saw the title I knew it had to be the break documentary. I saw this maybe a half a year ago. Good stuff. I worked on an entire E.P with beats centred completely around the Amen Break and it's variants.

[King Ellis]

The latest comment for the video (at the time of posting) sums this up.

[Cactus Drags]

Yeah, I figured as soon as I read the title, it basically spawned entire genres of music, it's incredible. My housemate at Uni when he first heard was like "Buzzcocks theme! Genius!" Rolleyes.