Meet A-Trak, the remixing wizard

Welcome to Meet the Producers, a CBC Music series that highlights Canadian producers making waves in their respective genres. Producers are integral to building the backbone of the songs we love: they turn ideas into fully fleshed creations, and because so much of what they do happens behind the scenes, we wanted to shed a light on them. 

Montreal DJ and producer A-Trak is a remixing guru. His knack for taking the essence of a track and imbuing it with new life has been on display since his earliest days on the DJ circuit in the late '90s.

A-Trak's magnum opus is the 2009 remix of Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Heads Will Roll," which became a party anthem after it appeared on the soundtrack of the 2012 movie Project X. The track has become ubiquitous, racking up north of 250 million streams on Spotify alone, and still gets played by DJs across the world 15 years after its release. 

Although A-Trak, née Alain Macklovitch, may be more recently known for his big EDM bangers and remixes, he's also an OG turntablist whose longevity is a testament to his ability to adapt. In 1997, at just 15 years old, A-Trak became the first Canadian — and youngest person ever — to win the DMC World Championship DJ competition. He took to the turntables at a young age, learning to scratch the hip-hop records his older brother, David (one-half of Chromeo), would bring home to his parents' basement in Montreal. 

After a solid run of wins, A-Trak stopped competing in DJ competitions in 2002 and began touring. That led him to meeting Kanye West at a London gig in 2004, which resulted in him becoming West's tour DJ until 2008. He also worked on West's iconic albums Late Registration and Graduation. While on tour together, he introduced West to the French electronic duo Daft Punk and their song "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger," which West would go on to sample in his hit single "Stronger." 

In the years since, A-Trak has founded a record label (Fool's Gold with Nick Catchdubs and Dust La Rock in 2007), started a duo called Duck Sauce with Armand Van Helden (their biggest hit is the 2012 Grammy-nominated track "Barbara Streisand"), and played countless festival stages — Coachella, Glastonbury, Ultra, Electric Daisy and Lollapalooza barely begin to scratch the surface. 

While becoming a juggernaut in electronic music, he has never strayed too far from turntablism. A-Trak's own productions tend to fall into the soulful house/groovy disco end of the spectrum, which illustrates his crate-digger's ear. 

More than just a DJ or producer, A-Trak builds entire ecosystems, keeping the artists around him nourished and supported. That sensibility was the impetus for Fool's Gold: he realized the mainstream labels were overlooking immense talent. Fool's Gold was an early supporter of Kid Cudi, Danny Brown and Run the Jewels. 

In an interview with Bloomberg in 2023, A-Trak shared that he and his co-founders wanted to "capture this exciting new music that's happening all around us at that moment. We found ourselves in a scene that was changing fast and cross-pollinating with different genres of music in a new way that felt really fresh and exciting….  And it felt like the bigger labels and the traditional industry were trying to figure out how to deal with downloads and Napster and LimeWire and all that stuff and wasn't really noticing what was going on on the ground."

A-Trak's still got his ear to the ground, continually signing new artists to Fool's Gold. In 2017, he also launched the Goldie Awards, a DJ battle for the next generation.

The A-Trak sound, dissected 

A-Trak is a master of genre-splicing, blending hip-hop, big-room EDM, soul and house elements all in one set. Thanks to his background in scratching, he developed particular technical abilities, as well as a sense of what part of a song is best to pull out and experiment with. When he adapted to using CDJs (a digital music player used for DJing) instead of just vinyl records and turntables, he discovered a whole new range of possibilities. As he told DJ Mag, "There were all these new buttons and functionalities I could use." 

A-Trak breaks songs down to their stems and uses vocals like a form of percussion. Watch how he isolates Missy Elliott's vocal from "Work It" in this scratching tutorial for DJ Mag (at 2:45). 

When it comes to A-Trak's own productions, his varied catalogue proves his dexterity. 

On the original version of "Heads Will Roll," the spacey synths meet Karen O's distinct wail to create a palpable tension. On the remix, A-trak speeds up the beats per minute, ices out the synths, flattens the drums, adds extra percussion to the chorus and loops the vocal to create an emotional swell. It stays true to the source material while finding space to push the envelope. 

In contrast to that colder, hard-hitting sound, there's the soulful, jazzy house of his 2020 single "Coming Home." It's a song brimming with warmth, and to achieve that sensibility, he pitches up the vocal sample, and builds a base of cheery strings and upbeat drums. Duck Sauce's latest single, "Fallin' In Love," follows a similar vein, although it's even faster and leans more into gospel house. 

With roots in an experimental medium like turntablism, it's no wonder A-Trak continues to test new waters in his music.