The heart of so much great hip-hop production is the sample: a piece of found sound that, when recontextualised, becomes the scaffolding around which a beat gets built. Sometimes the art is in taking something familiar and framing it in new ways. (Will James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” ever get boring? A rhetorical question.) But more often it’s about going into the dustbins of history to pull out something unusual or obscure—a process the great DJ Shadow once described as “urban archaeology”. Covering soul, funk, jazz and beyond, here’s a playlist of tracks best known for how other producers used them later on—the beats behind the beats. Our editors update selections regularly, so if you hear something you like, add it to your library.