Love it or hate it, Darude’s Sandstorm is undoubtedly one of the most memorable tracks in dance music. Recorded in 1999 by Finnish producer/DJ Toni-Ville Henrik Virtanen, its insistent, staccato lead synth echoed around the world following the song’s release, and 25 years on, it’s still reverberating.
Virtanen has opened up about how the song was made in an interview with DJ Mag, embedded below. “I actually got started with Sandstorm a year and a half or so before the release,” he says.
“I would find how other people on commercial tracks had their kicks and hi-hats come in, bass, and whatever, and I would make these charts to clock other people's instrumentation, arrangement, and whatnot.
"This one track had a middle part with a 16th-note repeating pattern of something. While I was studying the track, I made my own pattern with a similar sound that the track had, and that pattern ended up being the Sandstorm ‘doo-doo-doo.’
Virtanen turned his initial experiment into a demo using an early version of Cubase, before sharing the recording with a local DJ who would help him put together the final product. “In the summer of '99, I reopened that project. I exported that out as a WAV file from the tracker program, and then I put it into Cubase VST that I had just gotten, and it had a distortion plugin. Putting it through that and tweaking it a little, it became the Sandstorm 'doo-doo-doo' sound.
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“All of a sudden, I burned it onto CDs and took it to my local DJs,” he continues. “I also gave one of those CDs to [someone that] became my producer, JS16 - Jaakko Salovaara - and we met the next week at the same club, a club called Berlin in Turku, Finland. He asked if I wanted to be his first artist on his new label, and I didn’t even know he had a label - I was just looking for some feedback on the track.
Over at Salovaara’s studio, Virtanen and his collaborator transformed his initial demo into the finished track, using Salovaara's hardware synths to re-record the song’s iconic lead line and the supporting chords.
“We went to his studio, and we basically reworked Sandstorm,” Virtanen recalls. “What changed, or what was added, was actual hardware synthesizers, which I didn’t have - particularly the Nord Lead or Nord Rack 2, and also the Roland JP-8080, which was the trance synth.”
The very first preset that pops up when you switch on the JP-8080 is called Sandstorm, a bright and fizzy pad sound that Virtanen used for the chords that sit under the song’s lead melody, that later inspired the name of the song.
“When you turn on the Roland synth, JP-8080, the first sound that comes up is called Sandstorm,” he says. “That was it, and it’s actually the patch that is those chords.”
“Looking back, I realize how little you really need to create good shit when you just pick the right sounds, whether that’s on purpose or by accident.”
