These things just kind of like appeared in my life.
My brother would bring these turntables home.
And this huge record collection just like shows up at my house.
So, like, do something with it.
That's just like what my life is now.
It's just music.
RADIO DJ: Hot 35, special guest DJ, my man, El Dusty.
This guy has traveled the world and he's here tonight performing live at our Summer Jam.
We'll see you there.
Concrete Street.
Dusty was invited to clubs when he was a little kid.
Whenever you have a 16-year-old DJ'ing in your club,
that's pretty different, you know.
But he was that good, that early on.
My life kind of took a turn.
I was seeing my brother coming up, you know, he was in trouble sometimes.
And he had a little
gang stint,
and stuff like that.
And being really comfortable with that, it wasn't...
probably wasn't a very good thing.
Dusty's brother stole some turntables from this Quinceanera and brought them back home.
I helped him figure it all out.
You know, he had the Mexican blanket down, everything.
All the stuff on top of the turntables.
So it was real nice.
And then, like, he's leaving.
And he's like, "Alright, don't touch it."
And he, like, closes the door behind him.
And I'm like, "Dude, come on.
You can't do this."
So the first thing, naturally, that I did was go into his room and practice.
You never know what you're going to find in here.
An uncle of mine had passed away and they gave my mom this, like, huge record collection.
It was probably like, I don't know, seventy thousand records or some crazy,
like, a whole warehouse full.
And I was like, "What's going on?
Are we getting, like, this dude's stuff or what?
And they were like, "Ah, it's all records."
And, "Oh."
Alright, well, that should be fun.
I started finding all the songs that, like, people were sampling, you know.
I found this one sample and I was like, man, this is dope.
And then I looked at it and he had already like circled it.
And I was like, oh, he knew.
It's been like a daily thing every day just kind of like, here they are.
Let's find another song.
Let's find a sample.
Let's do this.
Culture is very important to me.
I love to have, like, my Latin roots in the sound.
The way I make music is inspired by what they were jamming to back in the day.
You know, I get to hear these old guys jamming to all these things.
And that kind of pumps me up to find this, like, killer sample that nobody's ever used.
And it has this, like, texture and color that, like, you can't really get from anywhere else
but an old record.
You hear something like Selena and it was a little bit more fresh.
She kind of opened the door for, like, these Hispanics that don't necessarily
speak Spanish to, like, listen to Cumbia and kind of go back and reference these old styles
and remake it.
Corpus Christi is known for Selena.
She's the one that brought Cumbia to Corpus Christi.
El Dusty knows how to grab different types of Cumbia
and mix them with trap and everything else
that is just not put together right now.
He's inventing something new.
Cumbia and, like, let's say, like, house music are super similar.
In Texas, it kind of gets this electronic twist.
And it's always kind of been like that here.
Cause when it got popular it was like drum machines and stuff like that were in the picture.
So it's like naturally like a house rhythm.
You know, it's like a house beat and then you put your Cumbia on top of it.
And that's how we make our tracks around here.
This is a song called 'Canto Negro' from Andres Landero.
He's an old Cumbia pioneer.
Like, most sampled, like, Cumbia dude out there right now.
Right now I'm quantizing the song.
So, like, back in the day they didn't really play to, like, a click track
or, like, metronome or anything.
So the songs are always like swinging around, you know.
That's why, like, the older recordings sound more groovy.
And it's kind of more live.
So what I'm trying to do is, like, lock it into the grid.
Now that I have the actual loop of what I want to use...
you can hear how it like lands on the beat.
That will be sort of like the main beat of the whole song is that little loop right there.
Then it all starts to make sense a little.
My dad was in a car accident when I was like four.
And he was paralyzed from the neck down.
So kind of seeing my mom going through that struggle of, you know,
living two lives for somebody.
It was really inspiring to me.
I was like, dude, you don't have nothing to complain about, you know.
Like, you can walk around, you can make music, you can do whatever you want to do, you know.
My dream is to be able to provide and educate and facilitate artists.
And have a place where people can go and make their artwork.
We have these afterschool programs that we do for kids -- Turntable Academy, Chicas Rock.
It's just something that we didn’t have coming up, you know.
We didn't have like a place to go and learn how to play music.
We didn't have a place to go to practice, you know, being a DJ.
Or even like seeing that stuff was just kind of like foreign to us, you know.
So we started these things so that way these kids can experience that at a early age.
This is basically my life.
I've been here since I was like eight.
And I'm 14 now, so it's had a big part of my life.
I can't imagine leaving it.
Some of the girls, when they start,
like they're really shy.
And then the girls grow to be, like, part of their school band.
And then that makes us happy.
Because if we can make a difference in one of them, you know,
that's a big thing for us.
Yeah, my album's going to come out in October.
It's called 'Made in Corpus'.
It's kind of like an homage to the city.
So a lot of my samples are on this album.
A lot of the stuff from the record collection, you know, are on here.
El Dusty is definitely one of those people that have stuck to his roots.
He's really bringing out the Latino culture into something a little bit more progressive.
It's really important for me to show where I'm from and put the Cumbia out there.
Because it's a lot of Mexico.
But it's also a lot of the US.
I want to show that and I want that to, like, represent where I'm from.
I want people to hear it and be like, "Oh, that's from Corpus."
And the sound to be really familiar.
You're going to see it and know that that's Dusty or that's Corpus stuff.