Before it was the backbone of Biggie’s “Unbelievable,” it was a few golden seconds buried inside a ’70s funk track.
In this episode of Drums Through the Decades, Jessica and Noam trace the drum break from The Honey Drippers’ 1973 song “Impeach the President” to its second life in The Notorious B.I.G.’s 1994 classic. Along the way, they show how a raw, stripped-down performance became a defining piece of ’90s hip-hop production.
By the '90s, sampling had become one of the genre’s most powerful tools. Producers were digging through crates for drum breaks, loading beat-up records into samplers, chopping them into pieces, and turning forgotten grooves into the foundation of entirely new tracks.
"Impeach the President" is one of those breaks: tight, funky, instantly recognizable, and full of the kind of feel that can’t really be faked. To recreate it, Jessica uses a minimal setup of a Ludwig Vistalite kick, Ludwig Acrolite snare, and two different hi-hat pairings made from Zildjian and Istanbul top hats.
The recording approach is just as lean. Noam builds the sound around an AKG D12 on the kick and a U 47-style overhead, then leans on Pultec-style EQ, tape saturation, vinyl-style processing, and heavy compression to capture the worn-in punch of the original break.
Then the track gets pulled into the '90s. The recreated break is loaded into an MPC-style sampler, degraded with 12-bit character, slowed down, chopped up, and played back by hand. The pitch shifts. The timing moves. The noise and imperfections pile up. And suddenly, the old record becomes something new.
It’s a perfect example of how limitations became language in ’90s hip-hop. The grit of vinyl, the character of early samplers, and the human feel of pad-based performance all helped turn a few seconds of drums into an entire sonic world.
Watch the full breakdown to hear how the beat comes together.