Music
Before the house wiz plays Lollapalooza, here are his tips for sampling classic pop successfully.
Reposted from March 2014.
Duke Dumont plays Lollapalooza on Saturday, August 2. Live stream all the action here.
Duke Dumont can be forgiven for feeling nervous. When he released his first single, Need U (100 per cent), last year he had no expectations. But it topped the charts in the UK and landed him a Grammy nomination. So it must have been a tough task to craft a follow-up with any genuine semblance of nonchalance. And yet his second single I Got U (featuring Jax Jones), out on March 17, is a joyful, confident affair. The Duke, it appears, has had a taste of what it’s like to bother the mainstream and he likes it.
Accompanying the sun-dappled steel drums on I Got U is an infectious Whitney Houston sample from My Love Is Your Love. Duke Dumont has used his deft sampling skills to give the track both heart and that infectious thrill of nostalgia. It’s a summer hit.
So what are Duke’s sampling rules?
Old favourites make for new hits
Working on an album and releasing a single that could potentially make it into the charts are two different things. An album should be a piece of art within itself – whereas a radio single has a slightly different aesthetic. The only sample on my new single is the Whitney Houston a capella. I love the original and it was really easy to write the music around it.
Respect your elders
We could have taken the vocal off and done something really similar. But out of respect to Whitney I kept it on and I think it sounds good. People like me are now sampling stuff that is relevant to us, like R’n’B records from the late 90s. It’s just history repeating.
Sampling is a huge part of dance music’s legacy – so respect it
There’s always been a culture of sampling in dance music. Whether you go back to the mid-90s and The Chemical Bothers or S-Express. If you go onto their Wikipedia page and look at the list of samples they’ve used, there’s always been a history of it. Using a Whitney Houston sample is just an update of that.
Don’t be afraid to go digging in strange places
When I was a kid I just wanted to make hip-hop. I wanted to be a superstar hip-hop producer like Dre or The Neptunes. A lot of guys who make hip hop sample 70s and 80s catalogue music. They weren’t records that were sold to the public. They were library records for TV shows and stuff like that. They’re amazing because they’re so bold and garish in the sense that they have no commercial ambitions. They’re just trying to fit a visual aesthetic.
They jump out a little bit more than the pop music that was going on at the time. And it’s perfect for sampling. I don’t think people realise how much hip-hop culture owes to these guys. It’s the foundation.
Listen up: the perfect piece of music to sample is…
Wendy Carlos’ soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange.
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