Jungle · Production guide

How to Make Jungle Music: Chopping the Amen Break and More

To make jungle, set your project to roughly 160–175 BPM, slice a funk break such as the Amen into single hits and re-sequence them into new patterns, then put a deep, reggae-style sub bass under it and arrange it in 16-bar phrases. Here is the whole process, with Octavate’s breakdown of their jungle track “Straight Up”, Stranjah’s classic jungle basses and our own break and pad videos.

By DNB Academy · Updated 15 October 2026 · 23 min read · Any DAW, beginner to intermediate

Part of our how to make drum and bass guide: this page goes deep on jungle, the style drum and bass grew out of.

Watch Octavate break down their jungle track “Straight Up” in Ableton: the stacked breaks, the bass “horn” rack, the FX and the arrangement. We use their project throughout this guide.

A short history of jungle

Jungle took shape in early-1990s UK rave culture. Producers sampled breaks, the sections of funk and soul records where only the drums play, sped them up and chopped them into new patterns over basslines borrowed from reggae and dub sound systems, with MCs on top. The Amen break, a short drum solo from The Winstons’ 1969 track “Amen, Brother”, became the most sampled of them all, and by the mid-1990s jungle was growing into what we now call drum and bass. Read more in the jungle section of our subgenres guide.

1.Set the tempo and the project

Classic jungle sits at roughly 160–170 BPM; many modern jungle tracks run at full drum and bass tempo, around 170–175, or a little faster. Pick the feel first: slower gives the breaks more swing, faster gets you closer to modern DnB.

Our videos cover the range. Our jungle pad project runs at 160 BPM (you can see it in Ableton’s tempo box), Stranjah works at 170 BPM, and our jungle breaks video warps the Amen to 174 BPM. The Primal Jungle starter loops are at 170 BPM, so they drop straight into a project at that tempo.

• Warp your breaks. In Ableton, Beats warp mode with Transients preserved keeps the hits tight when you change tempo. Our breaks video uses it as the starting point for every edit.
• Think in 16-bar blocks. “We work in 16 bar blocks, usually in jungle drum and bass,” says Stranjah (48:28). Octavate drop a locator every 16 bars and label them A, B, C, D so they can talk about each phrase (1:06:55).
• Group early. Octavate’s project has separate groups for the drums, extra drums, drum FX, bass, a lead bass layer, melodic “mids” and FX, which makes the mix much easier later.

For the full tempo and phrase maths, see our drum and bass BPM and structure guide.

2.Chop the Amen (or any break)

Chopping means slicing a break into single hits, each kick, snare and ghost note on its own, so you can play them back in any order. Warp the break to your tempo, slice it at every transient, and map the slices to pads or MIDI notes.

Before you chop, know what you are cutting. Here is the first bar of the Amen as it’s usually transcribed on a 16-step grid. It’s the same grid as pattern 5 in our drum and bass drum patterns guide:

Two kicks open the bar, a double kick sits before beat 4, and the main snares on 2 and 4 are surrounded by softer ghost snares. That is what makes a break “broken”: the backbeat is still there, but the hits around it fall off the simple two-step grid.

Slice to MIDI

In our marathon video, Stranjah drops an Amen into Ableton and uses Slice to New MIDI Track (40:31). Ableton cuts the break at its transients and builds a Drum Rack with one slice per pad, then writes a MIDI clip that plays the slices in their original order. Play that clip and you hear the break untouched; move the notes and you have a new beat.

Or chop in the audio

You don’t need a sampler. Octavate do a lot of their chopping directly on the audio clips, cutting, moving and reversing pieces “in order to make new break melodies” (15:00). Watch out for clicks at the cut points: short fades fix them.

We don’t play the Amen itself on this page, because it comes from a released record. If you want to clear your own sample use, start from royalty-free breaks instead, like the ones in the Primal Jungle starter pack.

3.Re-sequence, re-pitch, edit and roll

Once the break is sliced, write new patterns with it: move slices to new steps, repeat hits, re-pitch a few for variation and add rolls at the ends of phrases. Then glue it all back together so the edits sound like one drummer.

New orders and switch-ups

Stranjah rearranges his Amen slices into a new jungle pattern, adds a crash, writes a variation for the second bar and uses it as a switch-up from a plain two-step beat to the Amen pattern. He quantises the slices only to save time in the marathon: “Usually I keep it a bit more human.” The Drum Rack’s macros (Pitch, Tight Control, Filter, Drive and more on screen) let you shape every slice at once.

The simplest edit of all is repetition. Our breaks video repeats a slice from a snare onwards to get “a cool different variation and different chops”: one repeated hit can turn a familiar break into a new groove.

Re-pitch the same break in layers

Octavate thicken their breaks without changing their character. Instead of stacking a different break, which brings “a new kind of vibe”, they duplicate the same break and transpose the copies (15:30):

• The original, warped but not transposed.
• A copy at -5 semitones for body: pitched down, it gets slower and fuller in the low mids.
• A copy at +5 semitones for transients: pitched up, the attacks get sharper. They EQ out its tops and some harsh frequencies around 12 kHz.

Mix the copies under the original so the main layer still “carries the signal”. In their project the main break runs through the intro and both drops, and different “reply” breaks fill the end of each phrase, a call and response between breaks that works like a bassline.

Rolls and glue

Rolls are fast repeats of one hit, usually a kick or snare, that build into the next phrase. Octavate use a simple kick roll for the intro and build. Afterwards, glue the edits: Octavate put a short reverb before a saturator on their breaks so the saturation hits the dry and wet signal together, merging the sounds (22:50). Parallel compression does a similar job; our punchy drums guide shows how.

4.Modernise old breaks

An old break on its own sounds thin next to modern drums. To make it hit, tighten it, add a short transient on every snare, layer a modern kick and snare underneath, keep double kicks quieter and clean the low mids.

Our jungle breaks video (watch it here) takes the classic Amen, warped to 174 BPM, and upgrades it step by step:

1. Tighten it. Use the Transients setting to shorten the hits, or keep the splashy sound if you like it.
2. Add a transient on every snare. Lay a short click sample on each snare with a little fade in front of the original, “so the transient has a bit more space to breathe” (2:11).
3. Add straighter hi-hats. Hats that are “more straight and more upfront” help glue the break to modern drums.
4. Layer a heavier snare for a neuro feel, fading the layer so it doesn’t fight the transient you just added.
5. Layer a modern kick. Fade out the original kick, take out some of its rumble and place an electronic kick on top (7:23).
6. Keep double kicks quieter than the main kick, “because that’s also kind of how the drummer plays”.

How Octavate process their breaks

Octavate’s “Straight Up” is built on stacks of organic breaks, and the processing is mostly about controlling them:

• Soft kick, simple snare. One kick with no processing at all: “You don’t want too transient-heavy kicks in jungle typically.” The snare gets a high-pass, a small dip around 500 Hz for mud and a transient shaper (9:03).
• A multiband gate on the breaks. Layered breaks pile up rumble around 200–400 Hz. A multiband gate (they use iZotope Trash) cuts that mud while the highs stay lush, and it can work almost like a transient isolator (21:03).
• A gentle drum bus. Ableton’s Drum Buss on a low mix (26% on screen), its low-pass at about 10 kHz and the transients pulled back; then a Glue Compressor with soft clip and a touch of Saturator, because jungle is “quite gritty and dirty and you don’t want it too clean and clinical” (27:37).
• The “sheen”. A shaker or hat washed out in reverb, compressed hard by the kick and snare and kept very quiet, sitting above 10 kHz. It adds the sense of a room full of players behind the drums (41:25).

5.Jungle bass: subs, drops, reeses and more

Jungle bass is deep and simple underneath and playful on top: a sine or 808-style sub with long notes, plus character basses such as drop basses, reeses, warp basses and foghorns. Play them in call and response, keep the low end mono, and side-chain the bass to the kick.

In our 174 Production Marathon video, Stranjah designs ten classic jungle basses in Serum in 30 minutes, then writes a track with them. Here are the main recipes, with the settings he uses on screen.

Stranjah builds ten classic jungle basses in Serum, then writes a track with them.

Our Bladerunner-style jungle bass recreation, covered below.

The 808

1. Sine wave on oscillator A, with a 5 ms attack on the amp envelope to stop the click.
2. Pitch attack: envelope 2 on the global master tune, up one octave (12 semitones), sustain down and a very short decay of about 15 ms (1:29).
3. Slow pitch drop: LFO 1 in envelope mode, about one bar long, on master tune by just one semitone, so each note sinks slightly, “a little more kind of like an 808”.
4. Shape and saturate: sculpt the amp envelope so the waveform isn’t “a brick wall of sound”, then turn the filter on with the cutoff all the way up and use only its drive. Bring the master down to compensate and lengthen the decay (he lands on about 1.5 seconds).

Drop bass is the same idea with a stronger bend: LFO 1 pitches down seven semitones instead of one, more slowly (about two bars), with a softer attack, a longer amp envelope and less drive. Stranjah also saves a distorted version with a macro that switches an LFO wobble on (5:20).

The old-school reese

Stranjah’s old-school reese starts from two sine waves, not saws. Detune them in opposite directions (fine-tune +50 on one, -50 on the other on screen), then use Serum’s Bend warp mode to bend the sines and add harmonics: “See how it sounds angrier?” A short attack removes the click, and a little Tube distortion finishes it (10:00).

His new-school reese uses a saw with more unison voices, the stereo width pulled right down (to about 30), distortion, a phaser and some portamento for slides (11:35). For the full reese story, see our reese bass guide.

The warp bass

A square wave through a low-pass filter (MG Low 24), with envelope 2 opening the cutoff slowly (a 425 ms attack on screen), resonance up for “juice” and drive to warm it up. Stranjah shapes the note so it ends with a short tail instead of repeating, adds a delay that bounces back once, cuts the bottom end with EQ, then adds distortion and a mid boost (14:29). It’s a recreation of “the very first bass sound I ever downloaded, like 25 years ago”.

Five more classic jungle basses

The “Quest” bass is Stranjah’s take on the classic bass from Shimon and Andy C’s “Quest” (18:35); the pitch LFO square is a sound “used a lot in around 1995” (22:38).

Call and response

Jungle basslines talk to each other. Stranjah writes a two-bar phrase where the warp bass plays first and the Quest bass answers, then extends it to four bars with the pitch LFO square and the old-school reese (35:31). Two practical fixes from the session: if notes overlap, switch the synth to mono; and if legato makes a second note too quiet, turn legato off, because the new note carries on from the old envelope.

How Octavate build the bass in “Straight Up”

• One part, three layers. The main jungle sub melody is three layers of the same part, processed for different frequency ranges: a sub in Operator, a mid layer EQ’d and compressed for the mids, and a top layer (50:30).
• A “horn” rack. All three layers send to a rack that turns the plain MIDI sound into a horn: a convolution reverb (a default ambience), then an amp, Erosion for noise, EQ, saturating drive and a big-room reverb (52:48). Their tip: an EQ before the amp lets you choose which frequencies distort.
• The “wobbler” reply. One Serum patch with sine waves, an LFO on the tuning and the second sine detuned by 177.52 cents, then Tube distortion, multiband compression, a mono Utility and EQ (1:00:23).
• Bass group. Everything below 140 Hz made mono while the rest gets wider, plus a side-chain to a short “kick trigger” (1:01:24).

A Bladerunner-style jungle bass

Our recreation of the basses in Bladerunner’s “Jungle Jungle” (an inspiration piece, built from scratch) uses two Serum patches:

1. The low reese: 11 voices of unison (13 or 15 also work); what matters is an odd number, so one voice sits perfectly in tune in the middle (1:52). Then distortion boosted a lot, Hyper, multiband compression with the gain up and the highs down, and the filter on MG Low 24 at around 900 Hz. Afterwards, an EQ boosts one harmonic and cuts around 200 Hz.
2. The upper harmonics: Basic Shapes with the harmonics reduced to three, oscillator A copied to B and detuned for phasing, and no distortion at all, so it sits clean on top (4:04).
3. Movement: on the group, an Auto Pan automated from a 15 Hz rate on the first note down to 3 on the second.

6.Pads and atmosphere

Jungle’s calm parts come from pads, chords and lots of space: big reverbs, dub-style delays and samples that sound like they come from an old record. The trick is movement, so the pads never sit still while the breaks race underneath.

A jungle pad in Wavetable

Our jungle pad video builds this in Ableton’s Wavetable (watch from 0:49):

1. Oscillator 1 on Basic Shapes, moving the wavetable position for harmonics.
2. Chord MIDI effect: load the Major 7 Chord preset, so one note plays a chord, then change shift 3 to -7 (on screen the shifts read +4, +11 and -7).
3. Amp envelope: a slower attack, high sustain and a longer release (on screen 29.3 ms, -2.8 dB and 1.61 s).
4. Oscillator 2 detuned (36 cents on screen), with its wavetable position moved to taste.
5. Filter: pull the cutoff down, then switch the circuit type (OSR on screen) and add drive.
6. Unison for a chorus effect (Classic, 3 voices), plus a touch of FM.
7. LFO 1 on oscillator 2’s position, very subtly on the filter frequency, and on the unison amount. Finish with reverb.

Atmosphere the Octavate way

• A fake old record. The intro “orchestra” is just a free guitar plugin and Ableton’s piano, drenched in tape delay, written as if the drop were a remix of an old tune (1:23:40). Plain MIDI instruments take heavy processing well because they still read as instruments.
• Moving organ chords. Two chords, with filter, tremolo and auto-pan movement, and a frequency shifter automated to turn the chord stack into a riser at the end of a phrase (1:31:31).
• A shouted hook. The “straight up” vocal is one take shouted into a laptop, transposed with Ableton’s warp algorithms and sent into wet reverb and delays, “nice foggy, jungly chaos” (1:14:24).
• Dub delay tails on vocals and FX for “that dub vibe”, and laser FX saved for the drops.

7.Arrange it: Octavate’s “Straight Up” breakdown

Arrange jungle in 16-bar phrases: a spacious intro, a dry, mono-sub drop, a switch-up, a very wet breakdown, a hard cut, a second drop with new bass, and a return to the main groove to finish. Contrast between phrases matters more than adding parts.

Octavate wrote “Straight Up” in person, in long sessions of 12 to 15 hours, with a simple brief: make a jungle tune. Here is how the finished arrangement works (47:40):

1. Intro: zoom out.Distant, reverb-heavy breaks and the rasta “orchestra”, kept organic: no sci-fi FX yet, and no mono sub. “Keep it wide and then zoom in on the drop.”
2. First drop: zoom in.Drier drums, the mono sub and the horn bass, so the drop sounds louder even though the intro was full.
3. Two phrases, then a switch.The main groove runs for two phrases before a change in the groove; an element introduced in the switch becomes a feature of the second drop.
4. Breakdown: very wet.Strings and organ chords in a distant, reverb-soaked space.
5. A hard cut.Just before the second drop almost everything stops for a split second: “the contrast of quiet to loud makes it more effective” (1:10:15).
6. Second drop: new bass.The reese and alternative basses introduced earlier take over the lead, while FX keep it connected to the first drop.
7. Home again.“Home, out, home”: the main groove returns, then the outro mirrors the intro so DJs have something to mix out of.

Two more habits from the breakdown: they leave gaps at the start of phrases, not only at the end, so the vocal and bass carry the groove on their own; and they mix at a realistic level from the start, with no limiter on the master until it is time to bounce a version. For more on phrase lengths and drops, see our DnB song structure guide.

Pick your jungle style

Jungle covers a lot of ground. These four directions use the techniques on this page in different proportions:

Jungle sits next to some close relatives: drumfunk makes the hand-edited break the lead instrument, and atmospheric drum and bass goes further into pads and space.

Common jungle mistakes

• Looping the break untouched. A straight four-bar Amen loop is a sample, not jungle. Chop it, move hits and write variations.
• Stacking different breaks until it’s mud. Layer pitched copies of the same break instead, and gate or EQ the 200–400 Hz range.
• Transient-heavy kicks. Jungle kicks are usually soft and thuddy; a clicky modern kick can fight the break. If you layer one, fade out the original kick first.
• Quantising every slice. It saves time, but the swing of a break lives in its small timing offsets.
• A wide or busy sub. Keep the low end mono (Octavate mono everything below 140 Hz) and let one bass at a time own the sub.
• Clicks at the chops. Short fades at every cut, and a short attack on sine basses.
• No contrast. If the intro, drop and breakdown sit in the same space, nothing hits. Go wide and wet, then dry and close.

Free download

Breaks to start your first jungle track

You need breaks to chop. The Primal Jungle DnB Starter Pack has 20 drum samples from our full Primal Jungle DNB Drums Sample Pack:

• 5 jungle breaks of 1, 2 and 4 bars
• 4 drum and tops loops, 2 shuffles and 1 shaker loop
• 3 kicks, 3 snares, 1 hi-hat and 1 ride
• 24-bit WAV, loops at 170 BPM, royalty-free

It’s one of seven free sample and preset packs in DNB Academy Free Access, along with the mixing and mastering e-books and the 3‑day DnB challenge. Join 40,000+ producers in Free Access. Free account, no card needed.

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• Drums · PatternsDrum and Bass Drum Patterns: How to Program DnB Beats14 min read · Video + guide
• Serum · BassHow to Make a Reese Bass for Drum and Bass15 min read · Video + guide
• Guide · SubgenresDrum and Bass Subgenres: 12 Types of DnB13 min read · Guide
• Mixing · DrumsHow to Make DNB Drums Punchy: 3 Mixing Techniques8 min read · Video + guide

FAQ: making jungle

Next steps

Slice a break, write two bars of your own pattern, put a sine sub under it and answer it with a second bass. Then build out from there:

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