Drums like Block Rockin’ Beats

Last night there was a post on Reddit from Alternative-Bug-6905 asking about how to achieve the mid 90s big beat drum sound.

The drums on this song sound so overwhelming huge. How did they take Bernard Purdies drumming and make it big enough to rock blocks?

Before and after samples: https://www.whosampled.com/The-Chemical-Brothers/Block-Rockin’-Beats/

Here’s the Chemical Brothers track in question, the drums come in around 40 seconds:

And here’s where they’re sampled from, Bernard Purdie’s 1972 Changes. Sample appears around 3.52:

I spent some time typing an answer which I thought I might share here, slightly edited and embedded with more media. Here goes:

I hope I haven’t oversold this! There are a few things to consider. I’ll do my best to describe what I think they likely did, either through received wisdom or things I can clearly hear. I’ll also explain how I might go about treating drums like this in 2025. It’s important to declare that I’m not a primary source, so take what I say with a pinch of salt. I haven’t read up on The Chemical Brothers’ technique, so there’s some educated guesswork involved.

The Drum Break Itself

I categorise breakbeats into several types: ride/cymbal, hi-hat or percussion-heavy, and tight or roomy. This is a ride cymbal break (like Amen, Do the Do, or Assembly Line), and it’s roomy—meaning the dominant sound comes from the room mics compared to the close mics.

Roomier breakbeats react differently to compression, so when you slam them with a compressor, the room sound becomes even more prominent.

The drum break was recorded by Bernard Purdie – one of the most in-demand session musicians ever, so it’s got a great groove to start with. Recorded in 1971 (and released in 1972), it was likely captured in a decent studio (I don’t know which one), through a good solid-state console, onto tape, with great mics, and pressed to vinyl. All of these steps add to the original character of the drum sound.

Sampling

Now, I don’t think The Chemical Brothers likely sampled this directly from vinyl. Totally happy to be proven wrong, but while sampling directly from vinyl was commonplace in the 1980s and early 1990s, by the time Block Rockin’ Beats came out in 1997, sample CDs were widely used.

Sample CDs such as Jungle Warfare, Vinylistics, Datafiles or Simon Harris collections were (often) illegal rips of classic breakbeats and other nefariously sourced samples. These weren’t always first-generation samples—sometimes they were second or even third-generation.

The earliest sample I could find on WhoSampled of Changes was this from 1991. Compare the original sample from changes at 3:50 in the Bernard Purdie track to how it’s used in the Fresh Ski & Mo Rock track. It’s sped up and has an echo’d vocal shout that pans from left to right. It’s slightly more compressed and EQ’d differently.

There are many smaller details too. It could have been sampled off vinyl into whatever sampler they were using (Akai, E-Mu, etc.). The specific AD conversion, bit depth, and sample rate would colour the sample, as would any EQ on the vinyl mixer or external processors.

The most likely source for The Chemical Brothers’ sample was Norman Cook’s (Fatboy Slim) Skip to My Loops. This collection is a goldmine of classic big beat-era second-generation drum breaks. If you listen to it, you can hear some chopping, which is probably the giveaway. But again, I wouldn’t bet my house on this.

Processing in Block Rockin’ Beats

There’s a lot at play in The Chemical Brothers’ track. Whatever the source of the sample (likely an Akai S3000XL, MPC, or E-Mu E64), there’s a fair amount of EQ and compression. It would be pure conjecture to try to guess what used beyond “a sampler and some plugins or hardware stuff”.

By 1997, plugins are still in their infancy, so I don’t know if this would have been done on a console or whatever, but I’d probably guess not in-the-box. Computers were absolutely used for sequencing around then but plugins and soft synths didn’t properly take off for a little longer. This is what logic looked like in 1998 A YEAR AFTER THIS CAME OUT. There’s some basic plugins in there but no Soothe or Gulffloss 🙂

Once it’s in the sampler there’s some amount of chopping that’s crucial to getting it sounding fat. You can kind of see a little of what it takes in this article which gets close. From there it sounds like there’s other samples that have been layered in, crucially a bigger kick drum. It’s not a huge booming 808 kick, but something meaty that has a good snap to it.

It was mixed at Orinoco in London which has an EMT in one room and SSL in a another. Both consoles have very different EQ profiles, SSLs are much more flexible, EMTs are more known for their microphone pre-amps and colouration.

Part of why the sample sounds great is the compression. I can’t be specific about what compressor they used or even what settings would get there because I’d be bullshitting if I even tried, but I’d hazard a guess it’s nothing that you couldn’t get with your DAWs basic built in native plugins.

Getting Good Drums in 2025

Start with a good sample. While it’s nice to go to the source, sometimes the generations of processing a sample undergoes before ending up on a sample CD is what makes it special. For example, Hot Pants is a fantastic tambourine breakbeat, but Fools Gold uses it an adds a bongo loop, some delay and pitches it down a bit.

A funk loop might have been sampled off vinyl by an ’80s hip-hop producer, sped up for a proto-jungle hardcore track in the late ’80s, and then chopped up by a ’90s big beat producer.

I don’t think the chemical brothers (or anyone) in the 90s was trying to make things sound older… but now we have convolution reverb, different console channel strip emulators, tape plugins, vinyl simulators and even plugins that model how vintage samples behave.

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In Logic or Ableton, consider pitching the breakbeat. Speeding it up requires pitching up (to avoid flappy transients), while slowing it down benefits from pitching down. This was done analogously before timestretch technology existed.

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Cut the breakbeat into its constituent parts, ensuring you don’t cut into the transient. In Live, turn off fades at the sample start. In Logic, this isn’t necessary. I also clip-gain my samples to ensure consistent levels before processing.

Here’s my typical workflow:

• Pitch and chop the sample
• Clip-gain for level consistency
• EQ (e.g., with Pro-Q 3 but it doesn’t really matter what you use)
• Compress with a characterful compressor
• Add tape, vinyl, or sampler emulation.

This is how I did the drums on various 2nd generation emulation sample packs such as ReWorked Breaks, or this oldskool rave pack or this classic jungle pack.

NOTE these are all totally legal. I recorded these drums from scratch and processed them to mimic 80s and 90s technology.

Once you’ve sourced the right sample, pitched it, chopped it, and EQ’d the upper mids/top end, you’ll begin to get there. Add compression and limiting as needed. If overdriven into the sampler’s AD converters (as I love doing with my S2000), you can further colour the sample.

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