Hottest Flips of 2020

As part of our collaborative release with Chillhop Records this year, UK producer Psalm Trees made a soothing instrumental track sampling "Invente o Amor" by Brazilian singer Marcelo Cabral. On top of that, we wrote a long-form piece on how Tracklib enables lo-fi and chillhop producers to return to sampling these days.

“ The sample’s has a lot of low end, that I don’t think will fit the notes very well. But with some EQ and a lot of delay, which I tend to do a lot, it sounds alright. At the end it’s not really about how complex or technical the production behind it is - it’s more about the feeling you get from it". —Psalm Trees

New York-based electropop duo needed a pinch of Swedish psychedelic music to get to the title track of this year’s new album. Sampling an artist also sampled by BROCKHAMPTON for “Dearly Departed.”

“I knew I had to do something with ‘Syrenhortensia’ as soon as possible, so I started right away just going through it and chopping it up, adding some dirty drums, and recorded a super rough demo of me singing the melody on top. Most of the technique behind how I used the sample, is just chopping up parts that I think sound cool together and making my own new rhythm out of that. I also chopped up parts of the song that sounded more psychedelic to me. Here and there, I would make some sounds reverse or add little effects. By adding my own new melody, mellotron, analog synths, and guitars, I created a brand new, fresh tune. It's one of my favorite Phantogram songs I've written.”—Josh Carter (one-half of Phantogram)

A video on Instagram of Tobias Wincorn’s mom hearing “Break Shit” for the first time, says it all… A hard-as-hell track, with a rare Latin jazz sample to balance it out.

“When I heard ‘My Spies’ it seemed obvious for Jasiah. His vocal is hard AF, so I look for samples that bring the fun factor to balance the records out. I used RX 7 to minimize the sample’s drums. I put it in Ableton and made sure it was feeling right so Jasiah could just grab it and go... He programmed the drums - he’s a beast! I kept it super simple looping the intro back and forth with the horn lick for variation. Sometimes I chop stuff up like a madman. But this one was all there: a ready-wrapped gift from the Tracklib gods!”—Tobias Wincorn

With one of the last Beat Battles of the year, you can win an official release via the electronic music giants of Spinnin’ Records. Spinnin’ stalwarts Firebeatz judge all entries, and also made a track themselves using “Let Me Love You For Tonight” by Kariya, and the “People Get Up” acapella of New York producer/DJ Victor Simonelli.

"We really like how there's a nice soulful old school house kind of vibe going on. For this one, we actually used Ableton to stretch the vocal. We like that because Ableton is, in our opinion, best for stretching vocals. We ended up warping it and pitching it up two semitones to get it in the key of the track. (...) We do some filtering on the vocal so you can hear it kinda slowly fading away, and then coming back again in the drop. After the drop, we chop it up to have an extra section with the vocal. I thought that was a really nice addition to the drop. That makes everything come together."

A song against police brutality by rapper $NOT, who even got a co-sign from Billie Eillish earlier this year. Producer Marvy Ayy sampled a lead vocal from the Philly Groove archives: previously unreleased up until the original stems hit Tracklib two years ago.

“I knew $not liked lo-fi sounds, so I was teaching myself how to do that manually. Like downgrading bit depth, reducing the sample rate, physically altering audio fidelity... Quarantine had me going down strange rabbit holes. That's why the instrumental—even without the sample—sounds old and dusty. I actually did a lot of manual tuning of the sample, because the original song is in a major key and my instrumental is in a minor key. That made the final product bittersweet. I also did a lot of cutting and splicing of the source material, because I wanted to create an entirely new phrase and make sure the sequencing of words was grammatically coherent.”—Marvy Ayy