Dan Vigneau

Before I became a student at UMass Amherst I didn't know a thing about producing music. I didn't know anything about DJing. I didn't even know any electronic music. But everything changed quickly freshman year. After hearing from so many friends that they were going to electronic shows in Amherst and Northampton, I felt like I had to go to a show myself and see what it was all about. But I didn't want to go not knowing any music. So I had a friend of mine put over 300 electronic songs on my ipod.

After listening to a lot of new music, I discovered an artist named GRiZ who is now one of my biggest influences. GRiZ turned me on to a genre of electronic music drenched in soul, stanky with funk, and classy like jazz. While there are a lot of names for this genre (future funk, electro soul, glitch hop, electro swing, nu jazz, downtempo, chillstep, neuro funk, etc...) there is really no pairing of words that can represent all of the various artists making electronic music influenced by both the new and the old. This music combines vocals and instumental samples from old soul records with hard hitting electronic kick drums and thudding synth bass lines. It's music that takes you back to the past and flings you into the future before the song is through.

After hearing this music, I dove head first into trying to make it myself. Within a year I had produced my first song, made my first DJ mix, and collected DJ equipment to begin teaching myself how to perform live. I was enspired by GRiZ, who plays his saxaphone live, to incorporate my abilitiy to play guitar into my own live set. By the summer of my sophomore year I had landed my first DJ gig in Worcester and was jamming on stage with my guitar. Now, I am the Thursday night DJ at Late Night Berk at Berkshire DC in Southwest at UMass!

Going forward, I plan to get more DJ gigs in the Amherst area while I'm at school and more gigs in the Lowell area while I'm home for the summer. So hopefully there are some club managers reading this! But more importantly, I want to hone my producing abilities. I taught myself to DJ hoping to eventually be able to perform sets of entirely original content. I want to be able to perform my own songs at Late Night and have people come up to me and ask me "Yo, who is this?". With only a few years of mixing experience, I know that there is only room for me to improve. Follow me on soundcloud to see what I've got so far!