DJ, producer and Daft Punk collaborator Todd Edwards has revealed the source of a number of samples used on the French duo's 2001 track Face to Face.
Face to Face is a standout cut from the duo's influential second album, Discovery. Daft Punk's dedicated community of fans have spent the past two decades enthusiastically searching for and debating the origin of many of the samples featured on the album, with the heavily sample-based Face to Face being a particular subject of interest.
Todd Edwards played an important role in the track's creation, co-producing, co-writing and singing on Face to Face. In a recent Instagram post, embedded below, Edwards talks his fans through the samples used on the song.
"On Daft Punk's Discovery album, most of the samples they used were from disco and R&B, except for one song in particular, where they used folk music and soft rock. That's because most of the samples were from my sample library," Edwards says.
Edwards recalls that on the day he worked on the song with Daft Punk, both he and the duo recorded 70 samples each to a zip disk using Edwards' AKAI S6000 sampler. In his video, Edwards loads up the original disk from the Discovery sessions and plays through a number of samples, many of which were used on Face to Face.
Edwards spent more time playing through the floppy disk's collection of samples in a recent TikTok livestream, revealing cuts from Electric Light Orchestra, The Doobie Brothers, The Alan Parsons Project and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, among others.
He also discussed the origin of Face to Face's main drum loop. "No-one has this one yet," he says. "Everyone has their theories of where the drum loop is from. I don't even know where it's from!"
"There's one guy that had a theory it was a Chic track, but this is it," Edwards says before playing the original drum loop. YouTuber Danny Shazam has identified the sample's source as Jisco Dazz by Herbie Mann, pitched down by two semitones.
This unveiling of Face to Face's samples is something of a revelation for Daft Punk's sample-sleuthing fans, who have spent years hunting down the source of the sounds used on their tracks, even using Google Assistant's song recognition software to help them discover hard-to-find samples.
"Being friends with a dedicated group of sample hunters and watching the community discuss ideas for over a decade and then getting this, it’s such a relief," commented Instagram user joselobo75. "We’re so excited for this."
"All the YouTube breakdowns I’ve been watching since I was 12, and now we have some more insight from the master himself," said Ravejesusofficial. "This song seriously never ceases to impress me."
