Chop-and-flip sampler · hardware concept BR-1
Drop in a break. Get more ways to play it.
Breaker slices a loop at the transients, works out which hit is a kick, a snare or a hat, and builds two-bar flips that follow your tempo. The unit below is playing a break right now. Go on, touch it.
How a break becomes a groove
Load it. Chop it. Flip it.
The plugin does this to any loop you drop on it. The unit above is doing it to a real drum loop right now, with the plugin's own slicer and pattern code behind it.
Load a break
break.wav92.00 BPMDrop a loop on the waveform. The tempo comes from the file name or from the loop's length, and you can type your own or halve and double it.
Chop at every hit
Breaker cuts at the real transients and labels each hit: K kick, S snare, H hat, T tonal. Click a chop to hear it, and change the letter if it guessed wrong.
Flip it
Calm top left · wild bottom rightAn 8×8 grid of two-bar patterns. Top left is the break as recorded; the further down and right, the more it is rearranged. Every pattern is checked for a kick on the downbeats, backbeat snares, hats in each bar and no stuck repeats.
Punch-in FX
Hold a pad. Let go. Back in the groove.
The effect kicks in on the next 16th and works on the whole sound. Let go and you land back where the groove would have been.
Hold 1–8 on your keyboard for the same pads, C for BREAK, and [ ] to step through the patterns, as in the plugin. Click the waveform on the unit's screen to hear a single chop.
On the panel
Shape the sound
Every knob on the unit is wired up. Click and drag one up or down and the screen shows its value.
Groove
Swing pushes the off-beat 16ths late. Human loosens velocity, pitch and timing. Decay runs from 1 to 100: lower means every hit fades faster and sounds more gated, FULL lets them ring.
Pitch
Re-pitches tonal hits by octaves and fifths only, so they sit over your chords. Off in the middle.
Colour
Filter is a low-pass to the left, a high-pass to the right and off in the middle. Crush is a bit crusher.
Snare delay and spring
Only snares go in. The delay is a ping-pong tape echo locked to the grid (1/8 dotted), with send, feedback, wow, tone and duck. Throws decide which snares reach it: Phrase sends the last snare of every four bars, Chance sends about a third, All sends every one. The spring is a spring reverb on every snare, with send and decay. It is off until you tap the SPRING light, as in the plugin. These two are the plugin's own effect code, ported across.
The hardware family
One for the studio. One for the bag.
Two concepts, one engine. Both pair with the Breaker plugin over USB-C. The BR-1 does it all on its own; the BR-2 puts the hands-on bits within reach and lets the plugin be the screen.
BR-1
- Screen, speaker and the 8×8 pattern grid
- Fourteen knobs and eight FX pads
- Line out, phones, USB-C and MIDI in
- Works on its own, or as a controller for the plugin
BR-2
- No screen and no speaker: the plugin is the display
- 4×4 backlit patterns with page buttons
- BREAK, GENERATE MORE, FAV and FLIP, which steps through your favourites
- Eight knobs and the eight FX pads, powered over USB-C
Controller mode: pads, buttons and knobs send plain MIDI notes and CCs, so any class-compliant controller can drive Breaker. The full map is in the plugin's MIDI_MAP file.
Two ways in
Plugin first. Box later.
Breaker plugin
A chop-and-flip sampler for Ableton Live. VST3 and AU, built on a Mac.
- Drop in a loop, or drag a file on the waveform
- Drag a pattern out as MIDI onto a MIDI track
- Follows Live's tempo, speeding up or slowing down like a turntable
BR-1 hardware
The unit at the top of this page. A screen, eight FX pads, the 8×8 pattern grid, and a knob for everything.
- BREAK and GENERATE MORE under the grid
- Line out L/R, phones, USB-C, MIDI in
- The BR-2 is the budget sibling: the same engine with no screen