Mondo Knows Facts
The Amen break became the most sampled loop
A six-second drum solo recorded in 1969 underpins thousands of tracks The Winstons recorded Amen, Brother as a B-side in 1969, and drummer Gregory Coleman played a short break that later turned up in hip hop, jungle and drum and bass. Its dry, open drums are easy to chop into pieces, and Coleman never received royalties for any of it. It sits in Mondo's music collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
Where this comes from
Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
Go further
More facts like this
Clyde Stubblefield's Funky Drummer beat is everywhereThe 1969 James Brown session produced one of the most reused groovesA 1991 court ruling changed sampling overnightGrand Upright against Warner made an uncleared loop straightforward infringementCD audio samples 44,100 times a secondThe rate came from fitting film and television equipment rather than hearingSampling had to be licensed after a 1991 rulingA court held that taking a recorded phrase without permission infringed the recordingThe Fairlight CMI was the first digital samplerThe Australian workstation arrived in 1979 and cost as much as a houseThe E-mu Emulator brought sampling into reachThe 1981 machine stored its sampled sounds on ordinary floppy disks
🎵 Musicfact 108 of 200
← → to keep reading, or swipe
Tags: sampling, breakbeats, drums
The Amen break became the most sampled loop: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- A six-second drum solo recorded in 1969 underpins thousands of tracks. The figure is taken from BBC, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a music fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Music shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.