A-Trak Quotes

#1. Building the scene, going out and doing shows and connecting with the fans, cultivating the fanbase in all these cities. I'm very glad that it's happening.

A-Trak

#2. I think whether dance music had exploded in America, I still would've been a DJ a long time. This is my first love.

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#3. Traditionally, with a DJ set, you just go hear DJ that has a good reputation and let the DJ take you somewhere. It was up to the DJ what he wanted to play. Typically in dance music, people didn't know most of the songs a DJ played.

A-Trak

#4. We have to wake up early and make songs everyday. I run my record label. You work at hours where your body isn't designed to work. But it's fun.

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#5. I was a bit of an outsider in the hip-hop world because I was a scratch kid and people weren't necessarily trying to hear that all the time.

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#6. There's a ton of amazing music that's not getting heard.

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#7. Now I'm able to play on the main stage and play my own tracks and the crowd likes them. I feel like a lot the other DJs play a lot of the same songs, and not to knock them, but it's important to me to go up there and sort of sneak in a bunch of stuff the other guys aren't playing.

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#8. It's always important to me to play something other DJs aren't playing.

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#9. When I get up I still check the rap blogs before I check any kind of dance stuff.

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#10. That was my challenge then, how to make scratching still fun for someone who didn't necessarily come to hear that. It was fun to develop that technique. And now in dance music - I'm still a hip-hop guy at heart, but I love dance music.

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#11. There's a bit less elbow room and latitude to take it somewhere else, at least at festivals. In the club you can do whatever you want but at festivals, especially Ultra, nowadays the crowd wants to hear our songs.

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#12. My ears are open to all sorts of stuff. I appreciate some of the big electro house guys.I love their music but I also like a lot of the stuff coming out of the U.K. Future garage stuff. A lot of stuff like that.

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#13. There's a lot of producers that are much more technical or gear-skilled than I am. But I have a pure idea of what I like and where I want to go and I follow that.

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#14. I love disco and we sample it a lot for Duck Sauce. For me, that sound is kind of a new manifestation.

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#15. At festivals you kind of have to play the game a bit and you have to play a lot of the big bangers but it's to me it's extra gratifying to be able to play the non-bangers and make it work. Because that's still the craft of the DJ, I think.

A-Trak

#16. I have a radio show on Sirius XM. I put it up as a free download on my Soundcloud and on iTunes. That's a portal for me once a month, to play songs I know aren't getting played on that station the rest of the week.

A-Trak

#17. I think that's becoming the key to where the whole idea of art and culture are going nowadays anyway, is the idea of curation. Knowing what you like. That's sort of the future right now. Molding something, whether it be a roster on a label, or your blog, or a song, or your DJ set.

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#18. A few guys will get up there with turntables as purists, to play vinyl or whatever.

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#19. At the end of the day, Fool's Gold is a label that, when I hear something I like, I try to grab it for the label. There's a ton of great music coming out.

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#20. There are things I like, there are things I strongly dislike. In my DJ sets and in my production I just gravitate towards what I like.

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#21. I'm one of the few DJs who uses turntables. I'm the only DJ that's scratching.

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#22. That's what a DJ is at the end of the day - someone who leads where the music goes. The only thing that's changed is that in America, people have woken up in the last few years and realized it.

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#23. I've been doing it since I was prepubescent when I loved to scratch records and play good music. As it happens, you know I sort of fell into the mix. I really feel like I played a role in bringing dance music to America years ago.

A-Trak

#24. Right now it feels like we're playing a role, like me and a couple of my friends, in where popular culture is going. That's a very rare thing in a person's life to be able to be a part of that. It's a responsibility I take seriously.

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#25. When you know what you like and what you want and you're able to nudge things in the right direction, that's more profitable than ever, because there's so much information out there. Everything's saturated. Tastemaker is probably the most overused word, but I still think it's important.

A-Trak

#26. I worked with him for years. I still think Kanye [West] is one of the most important people in music in the last ten years.

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#27. I'm not even a trained producer. I just keep following my ear and working on stuff until it sounds the way I like it.

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#28. I'm still a hip-hop producer. I never put a label on what I can do as a producer or a DJ.

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