Dan Smith Quotes

I demo all of my songs on Garage Band, where I pretty much play everything - not very well, but I manage to hammer out a drum beat and a bass idea.

I think making electronic music isn't much different from writing a book or painting a picture or making a film. It's a creative process, and it's an art form.

EDM has trained a new generation of listeners' ears to accept a much broader range of what equals a song. EDM has become top 40 stuff: those sounds, those styles, those ways of thinking about song structure - even thinking that vocals aren't necessarily the central element - those ideas have made their way into popular culture.

I write all of my songs from scratch, so the one thing I love about EDM is the way a song transforms into a piece of art, and how the different sounds can change the feel of the record.

Certain key words, like, 'break it down,' 'this is how we do it' - they'll always end up on my tracks.

You should find the dopest producer in your area, and that producer is always going to want songs written to his beat.

In terms of writing more club tracks, writing more electronically influenced - I feel like it was all electronically influenced, but now that influence has come to me in a different way.

I've been gearing up for this future of writing a lot of new music by digging into my favorite old stuff, and twisting it around and highlighting the things I really love.

Yes, sampling has changed not just my way of playing and composing.

I'd been DJ-ing in these clubs in N.Y. and I hated everything that was coming out. So I decided I would make it myself. People were making mash-ups or remixes, but I was extra bored, so I actually started remaking these records from scratch.

I've always had a lot of creative impact on the music with Timbaland.

I never had any plans to become a producer when I was a kid. I wanted to be a DJ, like most other kids at the time. Then my mum bought me a Casio keyboard and I started to sample sounds that I liked.

Today, it's very tempting to create songs by cutting and pasting in the studio.

A lot of EDM is not bad at all when it's simple, but a lot of it is not really musical. That's just what I really like to do: taking what I had at the beginning, which is classical and jazz influences, and putting it into electro.

I have always been far more interested in sound than technique, and how sounds work together, how they can be layered. I think electronic music, in its infancy anyway, allowed us to create music in a way that hadn't really been possible before. It created a new kind of musician.

With '5 Boroughs,' we were each working on beats, sitting in front of our laptops and samplers.

Kanye is producing in the true sense of the word. 'Real Friends' was an idea started by me and Boi-1da. We passed it off to Kanye, and Kanye kind of stripped it down and had Havoc add some drums to it. Kanye had the vision. That's really true-school production.

It doesn't matter how many records you've made; there's always a new experience you can get with a new producer.

I'm literally am home making my own music unless I'm asked to be in somebody's house writing music for them.

I've been working a lot with Benny Blanco; he's a producer. And I've been working with Diplo and a bunch of other people. Detail, Charlie Handsome. A variety of people.

I've been a DJ since I was about 13, and I started out as a hip-hop DJ. So I was always playing records that would just get people going. I was just doing parties and high school dances and whatever, and then, progressively, I started making my own music, writing little songs here and there, but it was never anything crazy.

I used to re-create the beats that I heard.

All of my records, I produced, put together completely. All of them. Maybe Drake might come with an idea, and I might finish it. You gotta remember what a producer is. Quincy Jones is a producer.

The difference between doing a remix and an original track is that when you do a remix, you obviously already have the original track as a starting point. But with the originals you start from scratch.

I don't sample. I'm not like one of these guys who concoct some beat on my sampler and just turns it in.