For The Love Of House: Duke Dumont

As an artist it does seem that you have quite an eclectic back catalogue with influences appearing to come from across the musical spectrum. Is this a conscious choice to keep things so varied or just indicative of your musical tastes?

Yeah, it’s an organic process that has formed over a number of years. There wasn’t ever any intention of being intentionally diverse it’s just the way it has worked and surmises me as a person as I’ve never been one to get hung up on genre titles. I just want to make good music and feel your music should represent you as a person in some way and if it doesn’t, ask yourself why doesn’t it?

I completely agree that music should represent its author. Hence, I was perplexed to see an online guide on ‘How To Sound Like Duke Dumont’. It was bizarre to me that people would seek to promote sounding like someone else or that people would want to follow that advice.

Well I don’t think I have an entrenched style so I think a guide on how to sound like me would always be a challenge even if I wrote it myself! As an online guide if someone starts off with that and then goes onto develop their own style then I’m glad about that but you won’t get anywhere trying to sound like other producers. Your first hurdle should be making something you like and once you’ve done that you can move on as if you’re making something you don’t really believe in then you have a problem right there. My other worry is about the accuracy of these ‘guides’, as if I were 16 and just starting out I’d have been inclined to take these things as gospel and think that this is exactly how these producers do these things. It’s definitely not as I’ve seen that video with the notes and can confirm to you it’s completely wrong. But I don’t see it as a huge negative as it’s great that there is so much out there to help young producers now.

This is an opinion that most people I know hold now, that young poor producers pirating software are more or less doing so as a trial and those who start to make money be it through DJing or producing should then start paying for it to support the programmers that have made their work possible.

Exactly. If you’re 16 and have no money then you can’t afford to go out and get all of this software then what do people expect? People want to make music and I love that. It’s just important that we all show support for these developers at the first opportunity so they can continue doing what they’re doing but yes I’m happy that making music is now more accessible than ever before. I remember being 18 and having an interview for SAE in London and despite wanting to study there at the time I quickly realized I simply couldn’t afford it. So rather than attend there I got a loan, bought myself a laptop and decided to teach myself and to this day I do not know anyone who has attended one of these expensive courses and has gone on to be successful in the scene. They must exist but I don’t know any of them so my advice would be to get yourself a decent laptop and install some software and then go from there.

With a lot of software being readily available now lots of critics of modern productions claim that many tracks sound similar in their style due to so many people using the same programs.

Something that really annoys me is when producers sound like their software. Your software should sound like you. It’s not the technology that is at fault. It is the producers.

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