Sound Advice: Hannah Laing

Join Hannah Laing on Sound Advice, the weekly interview series covering artists’ journeys and their creative process. In this episode, we discuss how the Scottish DJ/producer went from Ibiza bar gigs to selling out her own festival, Doof In The Park.

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Welcome to Sound Advice, the series spotlighting artists’ creative process and their SoundCloud journey. We’ll get the inside knowledge straight from the source on how musicians, producers and creatives are leaning into everything SoundCloud offers to elevate their sound, get heard and catapult their careers. Sound Advice is now available in audio format on the SoundCloud Stories profile.

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On this episode of Sound Advice, we welcome Scottish DJ and producer Hannah Laing. An alum of SoundCloud’s 2024 Ascending class, Hannah is known for detonating dancefloors with her signature sound, which brings together hard house, bouncy techno and high-energy trance. A former dental technician from Dundee, Scotland, Hannah grew up on club music, thanks to her raver parents. Barely out of high school, she was summering in Ibiza and DJing at a bar called The Highlander. 

After nearly a decade of playing bar and club gigs around Scotland, Hannah got invited to open Patrick Topping’s stage at Creamfields Festival in 2022. After this pivotal career milestone, she ditched the dental business and launched full time into music, in tandem with starting her own record label doof, which is aptly named after the “doof doof” sound of a hard kickdrum. 

We talked to Hannah about her time in dance music so far, and her advice on how to navigate the challenges of the DJ realm. We discuss her evolution in music production, the crucial role that SoundCloud has played in her journey and the importance of giving back to your day-one fans. We also dive into her bucket-list experience going back-to-back with Armin van Buuren, playing her songs on the biggest trance stages in the world, and the heartfelt story behind “Have You Ever Loved (Ellie),” her latest single with Hannah Boleyn.

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LISTEN TO THE AUDIO EPISODE OF SOUND ADVICE FEATURING HANNAH LAING

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LISTEN TO “HAVE YOU EVER LOVED (ELLIE)” BY HANNAH LAING ON SOUNDCLOUD

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Things We Talked About In This Episode of Sound Advice

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Growing Up Raving in Scotland and Hannah Laing’s Introduction to DJing

• We begin the conversation by hearing about Dundee, where Hannah Laing grew up. One of Scotland’s smaller cities, Dundee has historically packed a punch when it comes to dance music. Before Hannah started DJing 12 years ago, she was a clubber, and spent her nights at a 400-capacity club called The Reading Rooms. In a buzzy period, she saw acts like Green Velvet, Eats Everything, MK and Patrick Topping in her hometown. 
• Hannah’s love for dance music comes from her raver parents, who had her when they were teenagers in the mid-1990s. Here, Hannah talks about the influence of her parents on her tastes, the styles of dance music that they played at home, and how she got real exposure to the harder and faster side of dance music, like trance and hard house. 
• When she was old enough to go clubbing, she remembers, “I got to hear all of the music I’d been exposed to at home in its intended setting.” From that raving pedigree, Hannah started DJing at after parties. 

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Hannah’s Enduring Love of Trance, and Her Patrick Topping-Assisted Breakthrough

• In the last decade, sounds like hard house, hard dance and trance have become exponentially more popular globally — but in Scotland, those sounds have been the staples of the national club scene. “They love it hard and they love the energy,” Hannah says of her fellow Scots. Here, Hannah goes into more detail about her love for the genres, and how, over the last decade of DJing, she’s been more and more able to play the music she truly loves to ever-growing crowds. 
• As she explains, she made smart choices: playing cross-genre dance sets in order to maintain a healthy gigging schedule, and get her name out there in the industry. But in the last few years especially, she’d been able to narrow her focus closer to trance and hard dance, which are her true loves musically. 
• It all clicked into place, she says, when British DJ/producer Patrick Topping started his record label, Trick, and started pushing “a fun hard house sound.” After signing an EP to Trick, Hannah was invited to play on Topping’s stage at legendary British dance festival Creamfields. In front of more than 10,000 people, she recalls what that pivotal experience was like, sharing that “nothing feels like playing the music you truly love.” 
• Reflecting on her journey up until that moment, Hannah offers some sage advice to other artists: that although she played years of shows, waiting for her big moment, it was those years of gigs that made her confident and skilled enough to meet her big Creamfields moment head-on, and make it a success. “I’m so glad it happened that way,” she says, “and that I wasn’t thrown in at the deep end.”

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Hannah’s Advice on Going Full Time With Music, and What It Takes to Be Successful

• During her formative come-up years, Hannah Laing worked a day job as a dental technician. Even though she’s no longer in that role, it’s an important story to tell: artists all over the world work day jobs to support their art and income. Here, Hannah talks about how the Creamfields moment had a snowball effect, and helped lead to her decision to leave her day job in order to focus on DJing and producing on a full-time basis. 
• What would Hannah say to other artists, who are caught between the security of a day job and the desire to commit to music full time? Make sure you have a financial safety net before quitting your day job, she says wisely, because if not, “that insecurity can affect your creativity” and the music career choices you make. 
• Giving further, connected advice, Hannah also says that being told no and being knocked back from opportunities are all but guaranteed to happen. The most important thing you can do is not take them to heart, and instead use them as motivation. “It feels so good when the no’s turn into yes’s, and you know that you kept trying and stuck to your guns,” she says. 
• What does it take to be a successful artist in today’s industry? Hannah thinks there are some qualities that come naturally to her, that make that journey to success easier — being an outgoing person, thinking creatively outside the box and the drive to work hard — but there are some qualities you have to work at, too. Here, Hannah talks about how to deal with the balance of praise and scrutiny, particularly online, and how “you have to be able to not have negativity affect your thinking about yourself, and decision making about your next moves.”

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Hannah’s Signature Production Sound and the Making of “Have You Ever Loved (Ellie)”

• Drawing from her upbringing and young raving days in Scotland, Hannah’s own music is a blend of trance, hard house and trance. Here, Hannah gets into her production beginnings, where she used vocal samples before she had access to live vocalists, and how she will use acapellas as a jumping off point for writing melodies. She also talks about the musical elements: how she’ll “take a kick from hard house, a lead from trance, and join it all together.” 
• While this blend of sounds has become her signature, Hannah admits that, for a long time she “struggled to get labels to understand it,” but that she knew the sound was working; every time she played her own tracks out, “they went off.” The love from the live crowd always spurred her on. 
• As Hannah’s music and career progressed, she got a chance to work with writers and live vocalists, which “opened my world up a lot more.” Here, Hannah goes into more detail about some of her collaborative tracks, such as “Good Love” and “Have You Ever Loved (Ellie).” The latter track is a particularly important one for Hannah, as it came together as a tribute to her late best friend, Ellie. 
• Working with vocalist and songwriter Hannah Boleyn, they brought a deeper, emotional element of storytelling, expressing the realities of loving and losing someone special, and tapping into the soaring emotions of trance to convey those realities. “Trance is from the heart,” Hannah says simply. 

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The Wild, Early Ibiza Days That Led to Hannah’s Success and Hï Ibiza Residency

• After her teenage days in Scotland, Hannah spent many summers in Ibiza, DJing at a Scottish bar called The Highlander. Going to Ibiza was a formative experience for the young dance music fan. After grafting hard, playing DJ sets in the bar scene, word started to spread back in the UK about her Ibiza sets, and it created a positive feedback loop of recognition and growing bookings. 
• Here, Hannah talks about her journey in Ibiza and how it led to two major career moments: her 2025 DJ residency at Hï Ibiza, and her own festival, Doof In The Park. Hosted annually in Dundee, Doof In The Park is named after Hannah’s record label, doof, which is playfully named after the sound of a kickdrum. 

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How Hannah Uses SoundCloud as a DJ, Label Owner and Producer

• Throughout her journey, Hannah has been on SoundCloud — and the platform played a particularly important role in the period when she struggled to have her sound appreciated by record labels. “My music didn’t fit in a neat box,” she says, and “SoundCloud is such an amazing platform;” where artists can self-host their own music, without labels, and where people from all over the world can discover new music and build a following. 
• Here, Hannah talks about how she also uses SoundCloud to find tracks for her DJ sets and artists for doof, and how she likes to use the shuffle feature to train her algorithm to find the right, new tracks. 
• Another feature of SoundCloud that Hannah uses religiously is private tracks. She goes into more detail about how she uses private tracks to send demos to friends and DJs for feedback, why she prefers SoundCloud to other platforms for this task — so much so that she explicitly asks for SoundCloud links when people send her demos for doof. 
• On the note of accepting demos, Hannah offers some advice to fellow producers. While it may be tempting to produce music that sounds similar to a record label’s existing catalog, in a bid to get signed, that’s not the best way to get a label’s attention. And while not everyone has access to writers and vocalists — a situation Hannah knows well — try to pick cross-genre samples that are more unexpected, so your tracks stand out from the crowd. 
• Recently, Hannah DJ’d back to back with trance icon Armin van Buuren, which marked a major achievement for the young trance lover. You can listen to Armin van Buuren’s own episode of Sound Advice here.
• Rounding off our conversation, Hannah talks about her goals for 2026. Top of the list is “finding peace in all the madness,” she says, and ends on wise words: taking time to truly absorb the pace of work and change, while looking after yourself.

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Links and Extras

Follow Hannah Laing’s journey on SoundCloud.
Press play on Hannah Laing’s 2025 single, “Have You Ever Loved (Ellie).”
Follow doof, Hannah Laing’s record label.
Hit play on Hannah Laing’s collaboration with Charlie Sparks, “Love Is A Drug.”
Go back to where it all began with Hannah Laing’s first upload, 2021’s “Murder On The Dancefloor (Extended Mix).”
Follow Patrick Topping, who released Hannah Laing’s music on his record label, Trick.
Check out Doof In The Park, Hannah Laing’s annual Scottish dance music festival.
Explore some of Hannah Laing’s influences, Armin van Buuren, Amelie Lens, Dax J, Nina Kraviz and I Hate Models, to name a few. 
Listen to the New Era Trance playlist on SoundCloud.
Never miss an episode and follow the official Sound Advice playlist on SoundCloud.

Getting The Most Out of SoundCloud

Learn more about using DMs to connect with fellow artists and potential collaborators.
Learn more about how to make a custom playlist on SoundCloud.
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Learn more about getting heard with SoundCloud’s updated algorithm, available to Artist and Artist Pro subscribers.

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_{CREDITS Host: Vivian Host, Executive Producer: Mike Spinella, Producer: KC Orcutt, Audio Engineer: David “DibS” Shackney, Coordinator: Trevor McGee, Editorial Associate: Lauren Martin}