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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.

A-Trak

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A-Trak
Age: 42
Born: 1982
Born: March 30
Composer
Disc Jockey
Dj
Entrepreneur
Musician
Record Producer
Recording Artist
Singer
Montreal
Quebec
Alain Macklovitch
Make
Guy
Technique
Love
Didn
Develop
Someone
Necessarily
Stills
Challenge
Still
Dance
Music
Fun
Scratching
Come
Challenges
Hops
Heart
Hear
Hips

More quotes by A-Trak

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There are producers that have been my friends for many years that I'm still a big fan of, from Boyz Noize to solo acts. Justice. It really varies. All the way to like...sometimes I'll just find some dude out of Chicago that makes a great house song. I'm feeling a lot of the deep house stuff, Jamie Jones.
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It's a good feeling to have something to stand for in any part of your life. It's like personal integrity.
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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.
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There's a ton of amazing music that's not getting heard.
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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.
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The essential component of being a DJ is setting the mood it's playing to the context. So that if you're not able to adapt from one context to another, then you're not a DJ.
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I'm one of the few DJs who uses turntables. I'm the only DJ that's scratching.
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When I get up I still check the rap blogs before I check any kind of dance stuff.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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I'm still a hip-hop producer. I never put a label on what I can do as a producer or a DJ.
A-Trak
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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.
A-Trak