“There have been times in my career where I’ve wondered: at the end of the day, am I going to own only 15% of my catalogue?”: DJ Shadow on why he stopped sampling and left the MPC behind

Dj shadow.

DJ Shadow rose to renown with the release of Endtroducing, a 1996 instrumental hip-hop classic that was the first album in musical history to be composed entirely from samples, dusty vinyl chops that Joshua Davis painstakingly assembled on the Akai MPC60.

Davis could’ve spent the remainder of his career pursuing the same sound, and some of his fans probably wish that he did. Instead, though, he chose to head in a different creative direction throughout the ‘00s, gradually abandoning the sample-based methods he mastered with Endtroducing in favour of an MPC-free workflow based around soft synths and Ableton Live.