Cleared Funk Samples for Commercial Use
Public domain, CC0 & CC-BY — with a license certificate per download
Funk breaks built hip-hop — the drum breaks, the tight rhythm guitar, the horn stabs. Clearing the famous ones is a legal minefield; the most-sampled break in history has been fought over for decades. The energy, though, isn't owned by anyone — and plenty of it lives in cleared, free-to-use recordings.
Hear cleared funk samples
What “cleared” means here
Every funk sample in the Selekt catalog comes from a named, verified source — public domain, CC0, or CC-BY — not an anonymous “royalty-free” upload. Each download ships with a license certificate naming the source, the exact license, and any attribution required, and samples from less-authoritative sources are fingerprint-screened against 150M+ commercial recordings. So you can chase the same pocket and energy — breaks, stabs, and grooves — from sources that are free to flip — with documentation you can keep, not just a label that says “cleared.”
How to flip funk samples
Cleared source is only half of it. Every track is analyzed for BPM, key, and mood, separated into stems (vocals, drums, bass, and more), and ready for the free browser tools — chop it, re-pitch it, build a beat in the Drum Kit, or re-voice a melody in Stem Lab. And modifying melodic loops is good practice anyway — it lowers the odds of an automated Content ID match (more in our guide to avoiding Content ID claims).
Browse cleared funk samples
Listen, filter by BPM and key, and download with a license certificate per track.
How to verify funk samples before release
A few minutes of due diligence saves headaches later: how to verify a sample is really cleared, royalty-free vs public domain vs CC0, and screen your finished mix against 150M+ commercial recordings for a signed audit log.
