Darude, Photograph by Nana Simelius
Finnish DJ and producer Darude is celebrating 25 years of his debut album, Before the Storm, and its evergreen lead single “Sandstorm.”
Inspired by the Dutch and German trance music of the early 1990s, Darude – the stage name of producer Toni-Ville Henrik Virtanen – started producing his own music in the mid-90s. His tools included a PC, the programs Cubase and FastTracker 2, a Korg TR-Rack synthesiser and the software synthesiser ReBirth, which emulated various Roland drum machines.
After sending a demo of “Sandstorm” to various Finnish DJs, one of Darude’s heroes, producer JS16, offered to sign him to his 16 Inch Records imprint. Together they re-recorded “Sandstorm,” pressed it to vinyl, and by late 1999, the track was a Finnish club number one.
25 years and several albums later, “Sandstorm” remains Darude’s signature song. We caught up with Darude to find out how he made “Sandstorm.”
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Check Check: How long did it take you to write and produce “Sandstorm”?
Darude: It actually took like a year and a half. Initially I was working on another project. I was analysing this one track and creating a track of my own based on the parts, like the layers and different sounds that were on this track. I was studying how dance music is made, basically. And in that process, I came up with the “do do do” melody bit [for “Sandstorm”] but nothing came out of it at that point.
I wasn’t thinking about making a track that somebody else would hear. I was just going like, “Oh this track has a piano there; I’m going to put my own melody there. This track has bass there and hi-hat there; I’m going to put a bass and hi-hat in the same places of my track.”
So, one part of that was this “do do do” loop, but it wasn’t distorted like this thing in “Sandstorm” is.
When did the melodic idea start developing into a full song?
A year and a half or so later, I opened that project and for whatever reason I rendered that bit of audio out – which is the melody progression of the “do do do” lead – and then I put it through a distortion unit and it became the sound that you now know from “Sandstorm.” And stuff started sparking.
It became clear at that point that you were onto something?
I was inspired by that, but I had no idea of any success or not even a release. I just felt it. Earlier the thing hadn’t really done anything for me, but when I distorted it, then it triggered something.
It took me two weeks, a couple of hours here, a couple of hours there, different iterations and different arrangements and some sounds here and there. Then I burned a CD of it, gave it to my local DJs and some of them played that version, but it didn’t do crazy things at that point.
I gave one of those CDs to a guy called JS16 – Jaakko Salovaara – who then became my producer and my label boss. He called me a couple of days later, like, “Hey dude, I like this track a lot. Do you want to come talk to me for a bit?” I went to talk with him and he wanted to sign me as his label’s first artist. And I was like, “Yeah. Of course.”
How big a deal was that, him wanting to sign you?
I mean, he was kind of my idol. He was a producer that dance music people in Finland did know, and he’d won producer of the year award a couple of times at that point.
So, then we re-did the track. I brought my samples in. The track is the same with the melodic parts and the composition but the production got a lot better. And that’s the version you know as “Sandstorm.”
What was the reaction when it was first released?
[JS16]’s record company pressed a test pressing on vinyl and we handed that out to Finnish DJs and some Scandinavian DJs and then it shot to number one on the Finnish dance chart and stayed there for seventeen weeks. And then we were like, “Oh, I guess there’s something in here.”
We were in the studio and we knew that it’s great, but we had no reference point in terms of what a homegrown Finnish dance music record could do. But it did that in Scandinavia and Finland and then his label started shopping it to labels elsewhere.
Neo Records from the UK signed it for the whole world and then signed it onwards to Central Station in Australia and various labels around the world – and it just blew up.
Was there a big trance and house music scene in Finland at the time? Or were you trying to do something different?
I wasn’t trying to do anything different or anything specific, anything on purpose. I just made music. Dutch and German trance at that point was my favourite stuff. UK hard house for sure. And before the millennium you already had 2-step and garage kind of vibes, which became quite big around the same time “Sandstorm” was a hit as well.
So I was following UK charts and then there were dance music shows on a couple of the local radio stations that I would listen to. But that would’ve been top 40 dance music charts, which in Finland meant European, German, Spanish, also a lot of Swedish dance music, which would be on a poppier edge, Eurodance maybe.
So the kind [of music] that I did, I wasn’t the only one and I wasn’t the first one, but it wasn’t mainstream at all. But certain club DJs would have that kind of stuff. You know, from Camisra “Let Me Show You” to Yomanda or Hi-Gate from the UK to obviously Faithless “Insomnia” and Sash! “Encore une fois,” “Ecuador,” that kind of stuff. Even gabber and happy hardcore.
The hardstyle and jumpstyle of today, I kind of despise that stuff. But happy hardcore was a bit different back then. I did some 180 BPM, very long distorted bass drum things and had a little bit of jungle breaks as well. Kind of drum and bass-y stuff as well.
All of that stuff has come back into fashion – uplifting trance and supersaw synths, but also UK garage, 2-step, jungle, drum and bass. Even happy hardcore has had a revival. A lot of the newer trance music is a very conscious throwback to turn of the millennium trance like “Sandstorm.” What’s it been like for you witnessing that?
I appreciate somebody creating that kind of sound today, but in a serious way, unironically. I’ve been very happy about seeing it surface, but obviously it’s a little weird because the production values back then were not up to par considering today’s loudness and crispness. So it’s actually quite fun to hear stuff made with today’s plugins and processors.
One of the key things that I’ve realised is that that sound was made with very limited gear usually. So now when you work on that kind of stuff, you have to go to the basics yourself as well. It turns out the actual melodies, actual chord progressions, and especially sound selection was the key.
Photograph via @Darude
What tools did you use to make “Sandstorm”?
I had a PC. I had a program called FastTracker 2. That’s where I programmed the “do do do” sound and a couple of other things for “Sandstorm.” Later on I compiled that and then drums that I made with ReBirth, which was a 303 and a Roland 909 and 808 drum machine combo.
I rendered stuff out of those and I compiled them in Cubase VST, which was the first DAW that actually had plugins in it. It was 24 or 32 tracks of audio that you could mix in it. And then I had one synthesiser myself, a Korg TR-Rack, and out of that I rendered separate tracks that I made in the multi-mode first.
But then with JS16, I took my samples and he used hardware samplers at that time. He had a couple of ASR-10 samplers by Ensoniq and then he had a Nord Lead, a Nord Rack 2, a JP-8080 Roland, like the trance machine, and then he had a Roland JV-2080, which is a ROMpler, which was a sound source for many many things on my stuff.
He had an Atari ST, black and white screen, old old display, and Cubase on that, but that was purely MIDI. So my tech was better than his from a computer side, but his mixing skills, his arrangement skills, and the hardware synthesisers he had, that was the key to my sound then.
Quite a bit of equipment then.
Well one interesting piece of info is that on “Sandstorm,” the original studio session and the mixdown, we used 22 channels on a 24-channel Mackie mixer. Later on, when I recreated “Sandstorm,” even with a couple of layers and some of the drum sounds separated, it has 27 tracks in Logic.
That just makes me think – 2008 or whenever I released my Label This! album, I had tracks that had 150 tracks in it. Just like stupid layering and overcompensating. But [for “Sandstorm”] it was very minimal and effective.
Is it surreal that music you made 25 years ago is still reaching new audiences and getting played in clubs and at weddings and house parties and gyms and all over the internet?
Every time I jump in an airplane, one on hand it’s a normal thing for me because I’ve been doing it for 25 years-plus now, but at the same time, I’m highly aware that being paid to fly across the world to play loud music, it’s a little insane.
It’s paid my bills for the last 25 years and the majority of the time it has not felt like work because it’s something I love doing: playing music for people, partying with the people, and also when I’m in a studio that’s my little adult playground.
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