I didn't expect my conversation with Paul Woolford about music production to be quite so involving. In the hours we spent together, the Leeds native was remarkably animated and reflective. Thinking back on his early encounters with sampling, he seemed to relive the incredulity of discovery, the feeling of not being able to believe what he was hearing, and the realisation of the possibilities it opened up—prospects as thrilling to him now as they were then.

Woolford says he actively seeks an almost childlike kind of naivety when he's in the studio. Whether making four albums worth of rave hybrids as Special Request or one of the many iconic bombs released under his given name, he balances a strong work ethic with what he calls "genuine glee."

"I have something called the chair test," he told me. "If I'm still sitting in the chair when I'm listening back, the tune is shit. Simple as that."

This undiluted enthusiasm explains why Woolford's continued to improve after all these years. From the joys of working with hardware samplers to his method for programming breaks, the ability to remain young at heart in the studio has fuelled every aspect of his success.

When did you first start messing around with music?

When I was really young. I'm adopted, and my parents received information from the adoption agency that suggested I came from a musical background. They said that if I showed any inclinations toward music, they should maybe indulge that impulse. And accordingly they did so. As much as they could at least.

So they'd encourage me with music class at school. That is, when there was such a thing as music lessons at school—it's criminal that they're trying to phase that out now. I went to drum lessons, learned a little keyboard but nothing properly. We're talking around eight, nine years old at this point.

I remember being blown away by the radio at this stage. You know how family life is, a lot of it is spent in the kitchen and the radio was always on in there. Then at night I'd have my little stereo, listening on headphones when we'd go to sleep.

As I got older, I ended up getting into gadgets and constructing things. First it was Lego but then I became obsessed with keyboards. First time I went to look at them in a shop with my dad, we spent a whole Saturday afternoon there. It was in the same place in Leeds as the original branch of Crash Records. Upstairs they had a room full of keyboards. I was like a pig in shit. Blown away.

What hit me the most was some of the Yamaha keyboards had a thing called "custom drummer." You pressed a button and the keys would trigger a kick drum, snare, cymbal and all the rest of it. I can't describe to you how visceral this was, realising I don't have to play a kit, I can just press a button and it's there. Then the guy in the shop is like, "Well, check this out" and he presses a button, metronome starts and he punches in his own pattern. By this point, it was over for me.

We're not talking about kit I'd use now. This is home keyboard stuff, the sort of thing they'd have in schools. But I got this Yamaha keyboard with the custom drummer function and it was life-changing. I'm around 12 at this point and the first wave of British dance records were starting to chart. Maybe a year later or so Bomb The Bass put out Beat Dis. It was a proper British cut-up record, a patchwork quilt of samples all collaged together. That really blew me away, too.

That's when I realised what sampling was. Casio had done this keyboard called the SK-5 and it had a little sampler in it. Cost £80. It had these little pads that'd trigger samples of a dog barking or whatever else they had on it, but you could sample your own sounds, too. I Sellotaped a microphone to the speakers of my stereo and plugged the mic into the keyboard so I could sample my records. It was ridiculously basic, but in hindsight I realise now how important that keyboard was to me. It was basically a toy but it taught me how to collage.

I'd want a stab from an Eric B. & Rakim record or a vocal from the Bomb The Bass album. I'd try and sample breakbeats but there wasn't enough sample time on the SK-5 to get the full loop in. But you quickly realise that if you play a lower note on the keyboard the sample plays lower and slower, and if you hit a higher note it pitches up and speeds up. As a kid I always wanted to speed everything up.

Through this I realised that, if I had an album track with a break I wanted, I could sample the record at 45rpm and squeeze the whole break in then play it at a lower pitch on the keyboard to slow it back down. I'd hold down the record button and let go when the beat was done and end up with a looping beat. That was part of the turning point between mindlessly sampling things, playing them endlessly and it sounding fucking appalling to realising you can re-contextualise and combine sounds from different sources. I recorded some of this stuff and made the embarrassing choice of taking one track to Crash Records and being like, "Look, I made a tune." It was atrocious. Really bad hardcore.

When did you graduate to more serious kit?

The seed was sown with those early keyboards but it didn't take long to need something more. There's a shop in Leeds called Big Deal that sold all these second-hand bits, stereos, studio stuff, you name it. It's still there actually—not in the same location but the guy is clinging on, bless him. All through my teenage years I was working paper rounds and doing whatever to get some money, then I'd go to Big Deal to spend my cash.

The guy there was so patient with me. I'd go in and say, "Right, what can I get for £120?" Then he'd be like, "You can have this, that or that." One was a Yamaha CS-5, the other a BOSS DR-660 and the third bit would always be something a bit more expensive, which in this case was the Roland R-8. I ended up getting all three of those bits. And even to this day, I love them all. I didn't have the R-8 long, maybe two years, but I made loads of tunes on it. I had the CS-5 for 12 years. I put it in storage but it disappeared with a few other pieces a while back. I was gutted and I still think about that synth now. Need to get another.

I've thought quite a lot about this time recently, when I was learning how to work with all this stuff. Everything I learnt was by accident and through necessity. Trusting your intuition and following your interest. None of it was done in a way of thinking "If I learn this, then I can do that." It was all for its own sake. Discovering.

One day I got a Sequential Circuits TOM, this '80s drum machine. I went home with it, messed about for three hours and wanted to take it back. Basically I always wanted a 909 but I didn't know how to get it because I didn't even know what a 909 was. I wanted those hard-edged kicks from the Inner City records. I realised I wasn't going to get it from this TOM so I went back and got the R-8.

I remember that day vividly even now. It's bizarre how you can remember specific details about certain days from your past. I remember how the light was shining through the bedroom window. I had the R-8 on the floor and it came with the extra sound card with the 909 in it. When I came across those sounds, the feeling I had—it gets me even now. Fucking brilliant day, that.

Are you making finished tracks at this point or just having fun jamming?

I was recording stuff to tape but it was very, very primitive. Nothing that I'd consider a track. When I was 16, I got a four-track TASCAM Portastudio. With that I felt, alright, I can create things with this. It was all really naive, which is something I've learnt to treasure now and try to channel. It's key to everything.

Around this time I was getting more inquisitive with the equipment itself. The CS-5 has an external input for running sounds through the filter and I remember just dicking around, didn't know what I was doing, and I ended up sticking a Roland 606 through it. I loved the 606 but I always wanted it to sound heavier. Then when I ran it through the CS-5, it sounded bonkers. I didn't know what a filter was, it was just a knob on this battered old synth. Then you could turn down the sound of the synth's oscillator so you could have just the drums running through the filter.

It sounded more industrial, more spacey. As a kid, you're into Star Wars and all that so I wanted things to sound really fucking mental. When I turned the oscillator back up… I don't know how to describe the sound but I distinctly remember the impression it made on me, this magnetic, droning sound with a smashed up 606 bashing through it. It bugs me to this day because I recorded it but I could never find the track. My parents moved house and my mum found a big box of cassettes I'd made back then that I'd forgotten about, but this tune wasn't there either.

There was loads of shit tracks in there and I never found that tune I was looking for but there were other takes on the tapes that were strangely interesting. At the time, I was frustrated because I thought it was all shit. I always wanted things to be harder. Now I'm glad it was the way it was. There was a narrow window of a few years where what I did with those machines was actually pretty good.

I also had a Jen SX-1000 around this time but it went on the blink so I took it back to Big Deal and had an argument with the guy there about it. He was like, "Well, what the hell do you want me to do about it?" But he did end up swapping it for me. He put up with loads of shit from me, my heart goes out to him. Anyway, I was maybe 16 or so and LFO had just come out. I remember an interview in a newspaper with Mark Bell and it had a photo of his studio. When I saw he had the Jen I remember thinking, "Holy shit, I have the sound of LFO." Still sounds great, that synth. I remember the Jen but not what I swapped it for. We're talking about 29 years ago. My memory's a bit hazy.

It seems pretty good to me.

It's weird, things that are important, they stay in there somewhere.

Stuff gets printed in at that age right.

Totally. I think that's what it is. You're like a sponge. The things that really mean the most are printed indelibly on your synapses. My earliest memory was when I was four sitting in the kitchen looking through the door of the washing machine like it was a window to outer space.

These experiences you're describing are so different to the early experiences of someone getting into electronic music today. It's a different type of psychology, now there's so much information and options that learning and making music becomes mostly a mental battle. Whereas when you're just playing with a limited set instruments without a specific goal in mind, not so aware of the big picture, it's less of a neurotic experience.

Most definitely. I know for a fact that this whole thing of making music is all about how you're thinking. All of it. Obviously you can have an amazing studio but if you're not thinking right, you're not going to get a peep out of it. I know people with mind-bending studios that are really frustrated because your mind creates an infinite amount of questions and you stop acting through feeling.

It's especially hard today. Because of these phones we carry around and all this shit, people feel like they're under constant pressure, that someone's always looking in, observing you under the microscope. That's the polar opposite mentality to true creation. It comes when you're free from all of it. When you can be the most childlike. That's when you're going to find the genuine glee.

If you don't feel genuine glee in every track you make, it's done. It's over. No one else will. Most music ends up as binary code in a digital file. But if when you made that tune, if you were jumping around the room losing your shit, it somehow makes it into the ones and zeros and comes out the other side. I have a chair test. If I'm still sitting in the chair, the tune is shit. Simple as that. If you're on the fence about it, it's definitely not happening. This probably sounds a bit mad.

Given the era you were getting into tunes and your interest in hardcore and jungle, did you ever work with tracker software?

Trackers passed me by for some reason. There was a kid at my school with an Amiga and I went to his house after class one day and he showed me these eight-bit helicopter noises. I was like, "I want that helicopter in my bedroom." And I remember when Urban Shakedown put out "Some Justice." That sound, it's two Amiga. I loved how crusty it was.

I also think I saw that Aphex did drukQs on a tracker. That bent my head. Apart from the prepared piano stuff. He put up that video of how he'd done a tune and I was like, "You fucking what mate?" But it also explains the sound of the tunes on druqks, super mono and glitchy.

This might be beside the point given you never used them but you've touched on how the tracker workflow can influence the final output—just like any composition tool. But the way breaks were used and the patterns we're used to hearing from the hardcore era are linked to how trackers work. There's this guy on YouTube called Xtra Spice Mikey running OctaMED with Akais and whatnot into a '90s Allen & Heath…

I think I've seen this kid. He's got a brilliant sound hasn't he?

When you see this hardcore jungle made in its original context, with trackers, samplers, the desk and so on, you realise just how much the sound we all love is connected to the technology of the time. It's an obvious point to make and could be said of any number of styles. You also don't want to fetishise this stuff. But when you see it done in the original way, it's pretty striking.

Yes, of course you can make this style in any number of ways these days but there really is something to making jungle in the "proper" way. Sampling a two bar loop from someone else's track and looping it doesn't really cut it.

Even though every second house producer is doing that these days.

Yeah, true. To be fair though, it wasn't until much later in life that I figured out how best to work with breaks. It's an art form with specific techniques for chopping and sequencing and ways to streamline the process. I only really mastered it seven years ago.

Which is more or less when Special Request starts.

I'd been incubating it for a while before the music started coming out. That's when I was drilling down and really wanted to crack those techniques.

What was that process like?

It was great. It was a laugh. Fucking brilliant. I was like, "Right, I've got this thing I've been obsessed with for years. Why am I not doing it? Why am I not doing exactly what I love?" This feeds back into what we were saying earlier about people these days being pulled in different directions by details. The key to all that disappearing is working on what you love. I know that sounds simplistic but that was the case when I was deciding what to do with Special Request. I was saying to myself, "You just gotta do this, what are you on about?" Arguing with myself. Then eventually it came to be.

With the breaks thing, I decided that, if I'm going to do it right, I need to learn everything about it then forget it and just play. I remember having what was basically an overnight realisation. I was lying in bed thinking about how best to do it and it just dawned on me. It was such a simple thing.

Do you mind saying what it was?

Yeah, fuck it. I'll tell you the secret to it all. Say you've got a breakbeat and you chop it up into loads of different permutations and different start points. Then you map out all those variations onto your keyboard so that each key is a different version of the same break. You need to make sure they're all the same tempo and play at the same pitch, even though you're playing higher and lower notes on the keyboard. Some samplers call this non-transpose mode. Then you trigger all the different breaks with the same MIDI channel so that every sample cuts off the other note.

This is how you get things to roll. Remarc used to do all his drums like that, with this mono-triggering technique. Once you do that, you mess about with pitches and the effects on each slice of the break. It's like opening the gates of Valhalla.

The funny thing about that technique that might confuse some people is that it's much more complicated to set this up in a modern DAW than a hardware sampler and a tracker, where this is more or less the standard way of working.

Exactly. That's in perfect harmony with what you were saying about trackers being optimised for this sort of thing. Anyway, I twigged on to that technique and I remember doing it the next day and being like, "Right, this is the shit." Before that I was always wanting more polyphony out of samplers and now it's like, no, one sound at a time.

I remember reading an interview with Goldie. He was talking about a series of DATs he made with 4Hero when they were working together at Dollis Hill. They were called the Expo DATs, which were basically disks full of sounds they'd sampled that were used for loads of tracks. The idea is that, instead of making a track and being done with it, you record part of your idea and then sample it. Then you use that as source material to make what becomes the final version. You're using the same sounds but in a different way. This opens up a whole other set of doors. You walk through one and it takes you down a whole other path.

I think this is when you really put your own spin on something. We're talking in the hardcore-style sampling context here. This is when it becomes something more than collage. If you resample yourself enough you end up having less and less relation to the source material. It either leads you to a dead end or somewhere heavenly.

This would also add layers of texture and saturation each time you resample, given they're being pushed through a sampler's AD convertors, down-sampled and so on. The vibe is there whether you like it or not, which obviously isn't the case when resampling in a modern DAW. Now if you don't have a hardware sampler or outboard, it's like, "How do I get that vibe in there?"

I think to add texture and retain integrity you have to take the sound out of the machine, run it through a mixer, outboard, through samplers or whatnot. This assumes you have the luxury of external gear, which is great to have but absolutely isn't necessary for making good music.

I don't want anyone to be discouraged by seeing or reading about expensive kit. I use all sorts of equipment and different rooms, but you don't need all of this to make great music. All you need is imagination. Anyone can make a record using a cheap drum machine and some ingenuity. The most important thing is what's in your mind. If your mind is in the right place you can make a work of art with anything.

There is amazing software out there now for degrading the sound but I personally don't think it's ever really been properly cracked in the digital domain. But I think it'll happen. There's probably some lunatic out there who'll figure it out.

For years I was trying to do the opposite, making things cleaner and cleaner. This is when microhouse and minimal were in vogue. I worked towards a really stripped-down setup and was super conscious of where all the cables were running to avoid picking up any hum. But eventually I was like, "What the fuck are you doing?" Nowadays it's rare that I try and rough stuff up intentionally because I'm usually using signal paths that sound vibey anyway. I've been using this Oberheim kit lately and they sound brilliant, super '70s but not in a naff way.

The SEM or something?

I've got the Two Voice. I wanted it for so long. The signal path I'm using with it puts quite a bit in the way but you can really play it on its own. Run it through the cheapest mixer and it'd probably sound better than going through an SSL. So that's an example of something where you don't need to degrade it because it's got its own thing going on that's evocative anyway. If there's no vibe there I'm going to ditch the idea pretty quickly in any case. I've found over the years that, the more ruthless you are with ideas, the more stuff you bin that you're on the fence about, the more you achieve. You only want to use sounds that you love.

So you won't ever work on something for a long time if you're not 100 percent sure it's going to be mint? You'll only proceed if you're totally sure it's going to be sick?

Yesterday was an example of the longest I'd go. I woke up at ten to five in the morning, god knows why, so I went and recorded loads of really lush synths, tonnes of them. Maybe about an hour and twenty minutes of stuff from three bits of kit. I picked the parts I liked, took the audio to a different studio I've rented, laid out the parts and then spent three fucking hours trying to add a particular style of drums to it. There was something of substance to those drums but they were also lumpy and leaden in this context where all the synths were soaring. I kept pushing and persevering with it and three hours later went to the loo and thought, "What a load of bollocks, bin it." Then I approached it with a different style of drums and in less than ten minutes it was popping. Whole track was done 50 minutes later.

That's the funny thing, right? If the idea works, the time it takes to go from nothing to something can be a matter of seconds.

The best ones always come together in record time. You're not even thinking about it. It's like the idea was just hanging there on a tree saying, "C'mon, pluck me." And you're like, "Alright, wicked." There was another tune I was working on yesterday where I was trying to add more parts to it, but you've got to be ruthless. Step back and ask yourself: does it really need it? Nope, doesn't need fuck all. Knowing where that point is between adding too much and there being not enough, it's tricky. That's what I've gotten better at over the years, not trying to crowbar more parts in when it's not necessary.

I went through a phase a few years ago where I wanted everything to be huge and epic. Now I can write a three-minute tune and be happy with it. If it feels like it gets cold along the way I'm happy to chop it down.

I read that you once used an E-Mu as a core part of your setup. Are we talking something from the Ultra series?

Yeah man, rack mount E4XT Ultra.

For someone who doesn't know why someone would bother with an antiquated hardware sampler, what's the appeal there?

The E-Mu E4 Ultra series were the best hardware samplers ever made. Of course people like to argue about this because they all have different characters but I always thought they were the best. But actually I started off with an Akai S2000 when I was 18 or 19. A guy was engineering for me called Jamie Sefton, he had one. I'd read about them and seen them in photos of people's studios in magazines but I'd never seen one in the flesh.

I was made redundant from a job I had at a DIY store around that time. I was getting something like £400 a month and they gave me three months pay as severance. I spent it all on an S2000. My parents were like, "What have you done!" And I'm like, "Yeah, I got this massive cream box that I don't know how to use." But I was so happy to have a real sampler because I was botching it for years.

Then E-Mu's Ultra stuff started coming out. The E4 Ultra series has these certain AD convertors. I didn't know this at the time but they are proper lush. Whatever you put into it, it simultaneously gains this heaviness but also a high definition quality. You can also sample at 48kHz so you can have a very clear sound if you want it, although downsampling to 22kHz sounds amazing on a lot of things. Then there are the morphing Z-Plane filters and the super extensive modulation matrix. It's almost like a modular synth.

The great thing about the E4XT Ultra is it has an internal 4 GB hard disk so you're not pissing about with zip drives. You can do and undo so you can try things out, which doesn't sound like much in the age of computers but is a pretty big deal in this context. It can sample its own outputs, too. You know how I was talking about resampling yourself, well you can do that internally here. It's got brilliant effects, which you can obviously resample as well and build up layers upon layers of different effects. It's got so many levels to it. It's a deep machine. But once you get into it, it's got a sound that's unlike anything else.

I still use it now. I laid off it for a while but when I got back into it I immediately realised why I fell in love with it in the first place. I will never get rid of it. I've actually got a whole stack of them. Four of them are damaged, the fallen soldiers. Leila Arab who used to put out records on Rephlex put me in touch with a guy who fixes them so unfortunately for him he'll be getting a delivery of four broken E-Mus soon.

One of them I got from a guy in a tower block in Birmingham. I think he was in Sandwell actually. I see this big old imposing tower and there's about 25 kids hanging about and I'm thinking, "This is a bit dodgy isn't it." I get in the lift up to his flat and the place looks like Fort Knox. I felt shitty because he didn't really want to sell it. So I go back down the lift and walk back out with this great big metal box while all these lads are lurking about outside. I was thinking, "I hope the cab's still there." I think I got it for £300. They were five grand when they came out!

Even though they're hyped again, the E5000 Ultra can be relatively affordable. It's a great shout if you can find one with the additional internal memory and the effects card.

Yeah, I think people have definitely cottoned on to them. If an XT Ultra was in really good knick you could probably get £800 for it. I saw some joker selling one for a grand the other week. But yeah, they are proper belters.

Still, they're not for everyone. I've had friends who had them for a bit but couldn't get the best out of them. Mine had a new lease of life when I did Soul Music because I used it with a Manley Massive Passive EQ, which is proper military grade equipment. Everything I put into the sampler went through the Manely first. This means I could sculpt sounds so that they're booming before they even get in the sampler.

This was especially a big deal with the bottom end. Say you're sampling a sine wave. You run it through the Manley, turn up the gain on the low frequencies and sweep around until your windows rattle. Then once you sample that and play it across the keyboard, it's proper large. When that's cut to vinyl and played on a big rig, that's when you hear bassweight done properly rather than just hoping for the best.

So the Manley was a total game changer for me as well. Once you've had it a few days you can almost tell who else is using it. Some people's sound comes from this EQ. I won't name names but once I got my own I realised "Ahhhh, it's the Manley that does it." I was using the Sequential Circuits Pro One a lot when I got it. I'd sample a bass note off the Pro One, loop it, run it through the Manley and then sweep all the frequencies around. It sounded mental, I'd not heard sweeping like that before. Then I'd sample those sweeps and play them with the keyboard, so once you've got a riff going, those sweeps are all moving around in strange ways.

There's a Special Request tune called "Vapour". It's all Manley and the E-Mu, just testing out the gear and learning the sound. At that point I felt like I'd landed on a combination where I could tell the overall quality was shifting for the better. Everything just got ballsier.

Another piece I run almost everything through is the Maslec MLA-3, which is a multi-band compressor. Another game changer for me. It really enabled me to hear things differently, to pick out new frequencies in the sound. It has a certain effect, not a glue-type thing, but it's almost as though it gives you more headroom in a mad way. I felt it as soon as I got it.

Certain tracks of yours, like "Catacombs" and "Curtain Twitcher," have these morphing synth parts that keep revealing different characters even though it's the same sequence. You might do this by fading between different voices or routing the same MIDI parts to a bunch of different synths. How do you approach it?

That was something I wanted to do for years but I didn't know how to do it. It bugged me. The idea came from an old Radioactive Man tune called "Itisanditisnt." It has this amazing riff that sounds like it's being sent to a million different synths—it just keeps changing and morphing. I realised that, yes, you just send the same riff to loads of different kit. You could also do it with one synth if you keep recording a riff and capture all these tweaked versions which you then layer up and crossfade between. But if you can do it with a few synths, it's magic.

I was doing it this week actually. One of my new tracks, there's a main voice and then a detuned one playing the same riff at a much lower volume. When you slowly bring up the volume of the detuned voice, everything just gets super lush and emotional.

I'm really interested in this type of thing at the moment, making stuff that's complex but evocative at the same time. The beat science stuff, I can do what I want with that. I can make rhythms the way I want them to be. That's not an issue. So now I'm focusing on getting the emotional content into it, to sound naive and gorgeous but also intuitive and human rather than relentlessly mechanical. Obviously there are parts where you want that rigid robotic vibe but being able to combine the two is what's really making me buzz at the moment.

It sounds like you're in a pretty good place mentally when it comes to dealing with the psychological side of making music. Did you ever have a period where you were more prone to comparing yourself to others?

Over the years I lost that thing where you're looking around at what everyone else is doing and viewing it all in an aggressive way. Possibly that's come from just growing up a bit. I want my tunes to sound as good as possible but I'm also aware that not everything is for everyone. Sometimes you think a track you've made is going to smash it in the club and it turns out so-so. There are records that are certified classics to one generation but when you play it to another they're not assed.

Reactions change over time. So if you look at making tunes in terms of utility, that's when you're losing the initial spark of what might have made an idea great. You can iron out all the fun of a good idea by over-engineering it and thinking "What's the mix-down like?" and all that. I would rather hear an amazing idea executed badly than a fucking shit idea that's beautifully executed.