How to sample like Daft Punk… in an online DAW

Daft Punk were renowned for both their crate-digging skills and the inventive use of the samples that their musical foraging yielded. In fact, many of their most famous hooks were built on the work of other artists.

The now-defunct (defunked? depunked?) duo’s sampling techniques have now been explored by Soundation, which demonstrates how three of Daft Punk’s most famous tracks - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, One More Time and Aerodynamic, all taken from the band’s 2001 album Discovery, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary - were put together. What’s more, it’s all done in the company’s online DAW.

The video covers sample selection, chopping and effect processing, and the end results sound remarkably similar to Daft Punk’s original tracks.

All of which demonstrates just how far music technology has come in the past two decades. When Daft Punk made Discovery, they were most likely using a hardware sampler with limited features; now, anyone can create tracks of a similar style in their web browser.

You can read more about Daft Punk’s sampling techniques on the Soundation website. Or, of course, you could just learn to play their music on calculators; the choice is yours.