Hard work and a love of sampling have made FNZ the hottest production duo around.

“When we started flipping samples in 2018, very few were doing that. We’d send our packs to people, and they’d say, ‘Oh, man, can you send me some non‑samples, please?’ And we were like, ‘Sorry, but no, this is what we’re doing. Take it or leave it.’

“Since then sampling has made a full‑scale comeback. Look at Jack Harlow’s ‘Lovin On Me’, Drake’s ‘First‑Person Shooter’ [both 2023], and Drake and Future’s ‘Way 2 Sexy’ [2021]. Since then everyone has followed suit and is chopping up samples. We love it, because it’s the foundation of what we do.”

Speaking is Michael Mulé, aka Finatik, one half of FNZ, the other half being Isaac ‘Zac’ De Boni. The production duo have been involved in hits by Kanye West, Kid Cudi, 21 Savage, Nicki Minaj, Drake, the Kid Laroi, Jack Harlow, Burna Boy, Offset, Travis Scott, Kendrick Lamar, Future and many more, earning three Grammy Awards in the process.

Slow Burn

Except for Kanye, all FNZ’s above‑mentioned big‑name credits date from the current decade, when major success finally hit. With credits dating back to 2009, it means that the duo spent considerable time getting to where they are now, working hard to improve their skills, and making the right connections.

“For years the stuff we were making wasn’t cutting through at the highest level,” comments Mulé, “because it wasn’t as unique or polished as it should have been. We didn’t have an identity yet. The feedback let us know that we weren’t ready yet. We weren’t getting the song placements we wanted, and we weren’t working with the people we wanted to work with. We spent a long time figuring it out. I think it was when we started working with artists like A$AP Rocky [2012] that the music we were involved in making began to represent our true soul in terms of experimenting with different colours, different atmospheric sounds and generally sounding different. After that it wasn’t until 2018‑2019 that we made stuff that when Kanye heard it and Drake heard it, they were like ‘Yeah, let me get on that.’”

Mulé: “For me it started in 1999, when I saw the Beastie Boys with Mix Master Mike on Australian TV. He was going nuts on a Vestax turntable. I was like, who is this guy? I became obsessed with turntablism.

Sowing The Seeds

Although they are now based in LA, the duo are originally from Perth, Australia, where their love of sampling was kindled. “For me it started in 1999,” recalls Mulé, “when I saw the Beastie Boys with Mix Master Mike on Australian TV. He was going nuts on a Vestax turntable. I was like, who is this guy? I became obsessed with turntablism. I saved up enough to get some turntables and a mixer, and started researching music and collecting records. I got heavily into the DJ battle circuit, with DMC championships, under the name DJ Finatik. This plateaued when I was 16, after which I started making beats. I again saved up money, to buy an Akai MPC2000 and other studio gear, and I studied what people like DJ Premier, the Alchemist and Pete Rock were doing. For a long time I was really bad at making beats!”

De Boni’s starting point was different. He played piano, and then, “at the age of 14 or 15, a friend of my brother introduced me to Fruity Loops. I began using it, and made beats for friends. From there I went to Reason and other software, and just kept hacking away at it. I was terrible, but for some reason kept going. When I got a bit better, a mutual friend introduced Mike and I. We lived maybe 15 minutes from each other.”

“Zac started coming over to my mum’s house,” continues Mulé. “I had an MPC4000 by then, and a Digidesign Digi 002, with the mixer, hooked up to Pro Tools. The 4000 was a huge, clunky piece of equipment, but it was great. We had a Yamaha Motif Rack synth as well. We made beats from scratch, often using samples.”

California Dreaming

Finatik ‘n Zac, as they were known, gradually built a reputation as the best beatmakers in Perth. At one point De Boni also attended the SAE Institute in Perth to sharpen his studio skills. But they had dreams of moving to the US, where, says Mulé, “the music was created that we were fans of. A friend of ours had a show at a small radio station in Perth called Groove FM, and did interviews with big producers from the US. One of the guys he interviewed was Jim Jonsin, and our friend got him to listen to some of our music. Jim said he wanted to sign us, but as time went on, we heard nothing and lost contact.

“We were doing regular jobs at this point. I worked at my mum’s café and Zac at an Italian restaurant. Eventually we realised that if we wanted to make this happen, we had to fly to Miami, and contact Jim as soon as we got there. So we did, with all our equipment, and he was just gobsmacked and shocked that’d we’d flown across the world. This was in the beginning of 2009. Three months later he signed us. We continued travelling up and down between Perth and Miami, and at the end of 2010 we moved permanently.

“Jim would be in his main studio, with artists like Kelly Rowland, Pitbull, Usher, and so on. We could come in, meet them, and then we went to a back room to build our own clientele and repertoire and confidence. Two years later, around 2011‑12, Jim said, ‘OK, you guys are ready now,’ and he invited us in his room while he worked with Ludacris and A$AP Rocky and others.

“During that time none of the songs we worked on were big hits, so the royalties were not crazy. It wasn’t until we moved to LA, in 2016, that we were getting some financial rewards for all the hard labour. Our time in Miami was about cutting our teeth and learning the ropes. We had sessions with amazing artists and this and that, but were still learning. But we knew that at some point we would have to move out to LA to build our career, as opposed to being in the shadow of a big producer.”

“A big shout‑out to Jim. He made it all happen for us early on,” continues De Boni. “But people were going to Miami to work with him, they weren’t flying there to work with us. Moving to LA was the beginning of us starting to forge our own identity, and for that reason we shortened our name to FNZ. We worked a lot with Denzel Curry, and also executive produced his albums. Our name started to build from that.”

“Coming to LA was like shedding an old skin for us,” recalls Mulé, “it was a new beginning. But to be honest, it was really hard. Many producers had told us, ‘When you move to LA, we’ll get together.’ But after we arrived, cricket silence. It’s the name of the game. We simply had to continue to prove ourselves, until people would reach out to us.

“Working with Kanye was another big stepping stone. We worked on his unreleased Yandhi album, and then, finally, a track we had done with him, ‘Everything We Need’, was released on his Jesus Is King album [2019]. We also were involved in the making of three songs of his Nebuchadnezzar opera, including the song ‘Wash Us In The Blood’ [2020, with Travis Scott]. After 10 years cutting our teeth, things really started to happen, and snowballed from there.”

Joint Effort

The snowballing culminated in an exceptionally successful 2023, with FNZ credits that include Kodak Black, Young Thug, Trippie Redd, Marshmello, Lil Wayne, Offset, Nicki Minaj and many more. FNZ’s most notable credits in 2023 include five songs on the Kid Laroi’s debut album The First Time, as well as Drake’s ‘First Person Shooter’ (featuring J Cole), and Travis Scott’s ‘Thank God’. Another major hit single FNZ worked on was Future’s ‘Wait For U’ (2022, featuring Drake and Tems), which won a Grammy for Best Melodic Rap Performance in 2023.

FNZ’s credits are almost always as co‑writers and co‑producers, but these can reflect two very distinct approaches: conventional co‑writing and co‑producing with an artist in the studio, in which they see the production process through until the end; or supplying starting points for other producers and artists to work with, without any further involvement. But sometimes the two approaches overlap, as the duo explain.

“Between sending out folders with tracks that other producers and the artists use, and working more collaboratively, I’d say our work is half and half,” explains Mulé. “An artist like Drake, for example, is hard to reach in terms of being in the room with him. But we have amazing relationships with producers like Vinylz, Oz, Tay Keith and guys like that, who have worked with Drake for a long time. So we’ll chop up and flip samples and then pass them along to Vinylz or Tay, or whoever it is, and they’ll add the drums to something they like and then play that for Drake. But with artists like the Kid Laroi or A$AP Rocky we start discussing ideas with them from the start, and we’ll either play them samples or Zac will get on the keys, and that becomes the starting point for new songs.”

Sampling was foundational to the hip‑hop genre when it emerged in the early 1980s, but the ways in which samples today are chopped, looped and treated are dramatically different. “The options are crazy now,” elaborates De Boni. “Sometimes we’ll find a sample and chop it up in the traditional way and make it sound amazing. But we can also extract the vocals from a sample and do a whole section where it’s just a cappella vocals, and then use Melodyne on an old ’70s vocal to change the melody, and add vocal harmonies that weren’t in the original. Or we remove the drums from the sample. We add synths, 808s, tons of different effects, change the key, and so on. We can manipulate and bend samples in many different ways. It’s great fun! We really, really love finding samples, and manipulating them and integrating them with cool other things, so they sound like one original thing, and not like a sample to which we have added stuff.”

Sampling was foundational to the hip‑hop genre when it emerged in the early 1980s, but the ways in which samples today are chopped, looped and treated are dramatically different.

Doing Flips

FNZ create their sample flips and song ideas in their studio in Los Angeles. “We don’t live that far apart,” says De Boni, “so I’ll go pick up Mike in the morning, and we head to the studio and crank out 15 ideas a day. We work in Ableton, and have a Focusrite Saffire I/O, and JBL LSR6332 and NS10 monitors. We just got the Mackie Big Knob [monitor controller]. We also have an upright piano, a Fender Rhodes, a Sequential Circuits Prophet‑10, a Mellotron, and some guitars. We have some microphones, but over the past few years we’ve taken to just putting two iPhones on either side of the piano and recording it like that. We use a handclap to synchronise the two phones. The other keyboards are plugged straight into the soundcard.”

“In addition to the JBL and Yamaha NS10s monitors we also have a big KRK 15‑inch sub,” adds Mulé. “For the room everything goes nice and loud. The NS10s are crucial because they allow us to fine‑tune things. Our ears can get tired and a little burnt on the JBLs at the end of the night, and it’s nice to sometimes work quietly on the NS10s. Some producers love to work loud all the time, but when you turn it down you can focus a little more on detail, and your ears aren’t going to get fried so quickly. When you get it to sound great like this, and then crank it up, it sounds amazing.

“When we were working with Jim in Miami, we were still were using Pro Tools for recording. But for production, we started using other things. We tried Logic, Cubase, Reason, Acid, everything. Then around 2014, DJ Dahi introduced us to Ableton. That made the most sense to us, and we’ve stuck with that ever since. It was a lot more intuitive than Logic for production. The way that you could manipulate audio in Ableton worked far better for our purposes, even at the time.

“It’s the audio warping, stretching, chopping, looping, all of which was and remains better than in other DAWs. Ableton works perfect for us, and it feels like home now. We also have just about every NI Kontakt library, every soft synth VST, every plug‑in for effects, anything like that. We’ve collected quite a lot over the years. We’re always finding new VSTs and new plug‑ins. It’s an obsessive sick disease at this point! We also have an Ableton Push, for drums, chopping samples, and things like that.”

Finding Samples

Until not so long ago, the duo’s process in their studio was split 50/50 between starting with a sample and starting with a musical idea of their own. But in recent years this has shifted to starting with a sample in more than 70 percent of cases. “The song ‘Where Does Your Spirit Go?’ from the Laroi album,” explains Mulé, “began with Zac playing the piano, and has no samples. There are other bits and pieces that have come out without samples, like the track ‘Keep My Spirit Alive’ on Kanye’s Donda album [2021], which started with Zac singing and playing keys, which we sampled and flipped. We just go on what we feel in the moment. But recently we’re definitely leaning more on the sample side.

“We just love finding really obscure samples and bringing them to the world. An example is this old ’70s Douglas Penn song ‘Do You Know’ that had just 200 listens on YouTube when we found it. We were like, ‘This is an incredible song, we need to chop it up and give it to Jack.’ We did, and it turned into Jack Harlow’s song ‘Denver’ [2023]. That sample is phenomenal.

“For Drake’s ‘First Person Shooter’, Zac and I were digging for samples, looking for the rarest stuff, and we came across ‘Look Me In The Eye’, by Joe Washington and Wash, from 1975. At the same time Drake was hitting Vinylz up all the time for more beats. Vinylz asked us, and we sent him a pack of maybe 80 or 90 samples. Our Joe Washington sample flip was all the way at the end, with a random name, because we name things whatever. Vinylz added drums, and he sent the beat back to us, saying that Drake had put it on hold.

“A week before the album came out, Tay Keith hit us up, asking for a dark sample. We guessed it was for Drake, and we found this obscure orchestral string sample, ‘Redemption’ by Snorre Tidemand. We chopped that up, and sent another folder, and the Tidemand sample became the second half of ‘First Person Shooter’. So we provided the seeds for both parts of the song, which was pretty cool.

“Another example is ‘Die Hard’ on Kendrick Lamar’s Mr Morales & The Big Steppers album [2022]. We had been chopping up a million types of samples around the time we were working with Kanye, and Kadhja Bonet’s ‘Remember The Rain’ sample was one of them. Kanye didn’t pick up on it, so we gave it to producer DJ Dahi, with whom we have a great relationship. He worked on it with Baby Keem when they were producing for Kendrick. We heard the finished instrumental the day before Kendrick’s album came out, and we were like, ‘Wow, this is crazy!’”

Producing Samples

FNZ’s aim is to deliver loops that are as finished as possible, needing only drums and vocals, and a final mix, to result in a releasable track. “We’re not just looping a sample,” says Mulé, “we’re flipping it, and finding the best parts, chopping and arranging that, and we drag the sample over different tracks for different treatments. We add music and other things on top and we’re doing a lot of processing and a ton of EQ’ing as well, because sometimes when we flip old stuff from the ’70s or ’80s, when we start pitching and manipulating it, all these different frequencies start popping up.

“Sound selection is the most important thing, especially when we’re sampling obscure ’70s, ’80s or ’90s songs. When we use the Prophet or are going through our VST or Kontakt libraries, it’s about having the ear to pick the right sound to lay over the top. You want the sound to blend, and not to stick out like a sore thumb. We may add a missing frequency, like a bass or keyboard for low end. You either play along with the bass in the sample or do something different. Sometimes we pick sounds that are from the era of the sample. Arturia Analog Lab is great for retro sounds, for example.

“In fact, it could be any sound, because we usually degrade the sound, using plug‑ins, like the Aberrant DSP Digitalis Digital Wasteland plug‑in. Sometimes we throw on a plug‑in that can take out drums, to get a wishy‑washy effect as the transients are smoothed. Sometimes we take out the drums altogether, or we’ll extract vocals. Drum removal plug‑ins or AI can create annoying artefacts and take away the clarity or purity of the sound, so we tend to edit drums out manually, replacing them with bits from elsewhere in the song or stretching the audio to fill the gap. It can get pretty surgical!”

“The aim often is to make it sound retro and current at the same time,” adds De Boni. “Sometimes we’ll have a sample that is kind of soft, and we’ll put a really hard 808 hitting under it for contrast. We just mess around. We try not to think about it too much from a technical perspective. I’m always making fun of Mike because he’ll put five EQs in a row, things that traditionally people wouldn’t do. But if it sounds good, why not? Whatever it takes to get the idea to work.”

Drop The Drums

The resulting projects are notably minimalist, usually containing fewer than 10 tracks. De Boni: “It’s something that we learned a long time ago. When we first started producing and making beats, we had a million tracks, with tons of layers. Over the years we’ve learned to do a lot less and be more minimal. Every sound and every track that’s in our sessions is doing something. We learned not to complicate things. When we find a sample we like, we’ll add what we feel it needs, but we don’t want to overproduce it.”

The final step of FNZ’s process is adding drums. However, they then take them off again. De Boni: “Everyone’s got their own idea of when something’s finished and ready to send out. But for us, we always test with our own drums. If it sounds like the full finished production with the drums, then we know it’s ready. We then mute the drums, and bounce the session down. Another advantage of testing it with drums is that it will sometimes highlight timing errors that you might not hear with a metronome.

“Also, just before we bounce something down, we’ll throw Waves SoundShifter on at the end on the master, and start pitching the track around, to find the perfect key. We can work on something for two hours in a certain key, and right at the end when we put the drums on to test it, we may change the key at the last minute. We may change the key three semitones down or up, or whatever, and then bang, that’s the perfect key. It’d done.”

Zac De Boni: Giving space for other producers to do their thing doubles the chances of it getting placed, because our network combines with someone else’s network.

Removing the drums is as much a business decision as a musical one. “A lot of that is to do with networking,” notes De Boni. “If we send another producer something that already has drums, they have nothing left to do on it, and they’re not going to want to play it for Future or whoever it is. They want to do their part. Giving space for other producers to do their thing doubles the chances of it getting placed, because our network combines with someone else’s network. They’re moving the beat around. We’re moving the beat around. Their publisher is moving it around, and our publisher is moving around. Also, we like to hear other producer’s takes on our loops. Drums may be their strong point, whereas our focus is more on the music. So it’s a team effort.

“We’ll typically send a producer 15 to 20 loops in one pack, mostly sample‑based. We sent 80 to Vinylz for Drake because we were trying to put in as much as we could. You never know which one might be the one. The producers are inspired by what we send them and add the drums, either with the artist in the studio or in their own time, and then give the beat to the artist. They don’t usually play the beat to the artist until it’s completed. There are exceptions, like Kanye, one of the greatest artists of all time who is also a producer — he’ll want to hear just the sample loops. Because when there’s drums on a sample, it can dictate too much where the song is going to go.”

“We’re almost OCD when it comes to sending samples out or playing something to someone,” concludes Mulé. “We want everything to sound great. We don’t want anything to jump out crazy loud or any high end that’s going to screech everyone’s ears. We always pay attention to detail and make sure something is EQ’ed right and it’s got the right compression or processing. We try to get it as good as we possibly can, to where it makes the next person’s part easier, and inspires them to take what we have done further.”