Todd Ray: Those Ultimate Beats and Breaks would drop, and next thing you know, Eric B. and Rakim has a song with a beat that was on it. I’d start seeing how the breaks were really influencing not only the artists, the rappers and the producers and DJs, but now all of a sudden these breaks are influencing the whole culture.

Louis Flores: There’s a certain way that I edited “Impeach The President,” there’s a slight pop on one of the edits that you can hear and people tend to sample that, and they have no idea that I can tell. It’s a little crackle.

Questlove has pointed that out to me, “I know when somebody samples from you and when they use the original, because I hear the crackle and pop that they use.” They’re identifiable sounds. Like with “Think,” there’s a slight little swing to the way I looped the record, because I didn’t record it at the locked-in 45 rpm. The way I locked it in is maybe 46 or 47 rpm.

K-Prince: I heard people were trying to get the test presses before the actual volumes came out, because they would be the first to sample the white label a few months before the actual pressings came out. My friend Willie Dynamite used to work at Downstairs Records. Ced-Gee, Marley Marl would come into the shop, asking if they had gotten the test pressings for the next volume.

Phill Most Chill: You had dudes that would do their whole album using just Ultimate Breaks & Beats for a while there in the late 80s. When De La Soul came out with 3 Feet High and Rising that let people know you have to go deeper, you can’t just take those breaks. You’ve gotta find your own stuff. After that, you saw more people go deeper and deeper. You started seeing stuff by Tribe Called Quest using stuff like the RAMP album. People started to realize, “We can’t just use the obvious stuff if we’re really gonna be respected for what we’re doing.”

Louis Flores: Mantronik would want to get a test-pressing as soon as we got them. He would say, “Whatever you want, I’ll give you for the test pressing.” In the later volumes, we were trying to push the envelope in the sense to do your homework the same way we used to do our homework. We tried to give you the tools to let you know there’s more you can search for than just what’s here. You can do your homework and go to a store and find out what else can be on Stax Records, what else can be on People Records. We were the college for diggers. The digging craze started with us.

Paul Nice: Unless you were in the circle of the Zulu Nation DJ’s, you weren’t gonna know what these records were. I look at it as a transitional period, from the time that those records first came out. It kind of fed on itself in terms of the creativity of producers and trying to dig deeper. It was a digging renaissance when the volumes stopped coming out and people were forced to be more creative and dig deeper and sample records that people wouldn’t have sampled before.

Large Professor: [Producer] Paul C would invite me over there [1212 Studio], cause once we started going over there to record demos, Paul just noticed the hunger that I had. I was coming in with new records; I wasn’t just coming in with “Impeach The President” and the same old shit. That was the big thing back then, if you could get outside of the Ultimate Breaks & Beats. If you could come in with some old other shit and be like, “Yo! This part!” I was going out to Lefrak and getting mad records. People was like, “Yo, my parents aren’t using these no more, take ‘em.” So I had crazy records that was not on the Ultimate Breaks. Paul liked that about me because he was big on the records too.

Despite the wealth of online resources such as WhoSampled.com and YouTube, there are still songs on the UBB albums that still have collectors scratching their heads to this very day.