Breakcore is a genre that I've actually explored production with quite a bit. I'm pretty comfortable with chopping up drumloops and figuring out which effects work best, like flanger and delay in some parts to make things sound cooler. Also it's just insanely fun to produce.
The song is based primarily around My Chemical Romance's 'The Ghost of You,' which I sped up to 210bpm in line with breakcore's usual tempo range as well as pitching it up quite a bit and messing around with sections. One of the most important steps is cutting out the lower frequencies of the sample with an equalizer so that the original drums are less audible over the breakbeats. I cut out some bits and reversed them (forgive my keysmash renaming LOL), layering them with other segments (especially the chorus) to create a pretty cool atmospheric effect. I also used gross beat, an effect that allows you to manipulate the timing of a stem and shift noises around basically. Gross beat is super useful in breakcore in my experience, especially paired with reverb and stereo delay to create complex textures. That little sample in the bottom left of the first image below is a kind of producer tag I guess? that I made with this super cool text-to-speech program. Fun fact: the same TTS program was used for the Wired voice in Serial Experiments: Lain :D
After messing with the sample a bit comes the obvious main component, drums. I have a hardcore breaks / jungle drumloop pack downloaded with a bunch of different breaks, and my usual process for breakcore involves choosing whatever sample has the best timbre / tonal qualities and then chopping it up to match the rhythm of the song sample. Messing around with rhythms and patterns is sooooo much fun to me, I love lining things up with the original song as well as flipping rhythms up through the drums.
As for the cover art I kinda just came up with something I thought looked cool. I layered a US flag over a still from Tony Scott's Deja Vu and added a cool little old web US flag heart thing in the corner because breakcore has always had a connection to 2000s internet culture. There's not really a set look for breakcore cover art, but internet imagery is pretty pervasive. So yeah LOL I really like how this art turned out.
In terms of music videos, I don't think I've actually watched any breakcore stuff ,,, but since the visuals in general are internet- and anime-based, I guess I could do something like Machine Girl's
DJ mix visuals.
Most of my breakcore stuff is very sample-based, as with a lot of the genre, this song included. Breakcore has evolved a LOT since its conception. It used to consist of IDM-adjacent super fast drill-and-bass type stuff with a dark aesthetic, but in the past decade or so its grown to be more adjacent with things like the nightcore and anime communities. I chose to sample an MCR song because they've been one of my favorite bands since elementary school and newer waves of breakcore tend to draw a lot from childhood nostalgia, hence the prevalence of nightcore, which was popular in the early 2010s. I've been into breakcore for around 4 years now, getting into it through Machine Girl, who I mentioned in the footwork post, but never thought about producing it myself until late last year. One of my favorite albums, which inspired me to get into producing breakcore on my own, is hsiu's you were beautiful when i loved you, you were beautiful when i lost you., which the creator has said is a very personal and sentimental sample-based project for them. Seeing someone transform music they love into something that sounds arguably even cooler was super inspiring, and I went for something similar here with my own flair :nerd:
