ATB — 9 PM (Till I Come)

André Tanneberger cut 9 PM (Till I Come) in a Freiburg bedroom studio on a Roland JP-8000 and a copy of Cakewalk. Nine months later it was the UK's number-one single, sitting above Boyzone and Whitney Houston, and the talkbox-processed guitar lead — one of the most identifiable four-note phrases in dance music — was on every European radio station in the summer of 1999.

Tanneberger was 26, working as a Woolworths shift manager in Freiburg, when he wrote 9 PM as a proposed B-side to his group Sequential One's 'Let Your Body Talk'. The talkbox lead was made by running a Fender Stratocaster sample through a Digitech Talker pedal against a JP-8000 supersaw; the four-note melody was written in ten minutes and the whole record was arranged in a weekend. Kontor A&R Jens Thele signed it as an A-side within a fortnight of hearing the demo.

134 BPM, A minor, four-on-the-floor kick with an offbeat filtered bass. The lead sound — everybody's talkbox reference point — is the Talker pedal running the Strat sample. The breakdown at 2:40 strips to a single pad and a vocal snippet ('till I come') before the lead re-enters doubled. Tanneberger has said the two-note pitch drop on the fourth note of the phrase was 'a mistake I never fixed because it sounded right.'

Reached #1 on the UK Singles Chart in April 1999, staying there for two weeks — the first German-produced instrumental trance record ever to top the UK chart. Number one in Germany, Austria and Switzerland for eight cumulative weeks; certified platinum in the UK by the end of 1999. Voted 'Best Selling German Single' at the Echo Awards 2000.

• UK Singles Chart#1
• German Singles Chart#1
• Australian ARIA Chart#4

• 0:20The talkbox lead enters — four notes, one dropped.
• 2:40Breakdown to pad and 'till I come' vocal chop.
• 3:20Lead re-enters doubled with a second harmonised layer.

• Original Radio Mix (1998)

  The 3:29 version that hit UK #1.

• 9 PM (Till I Come) Club Mix

  The 6:30 extended mix; the version DJs actually played.

• Sequential One Remix

  ATB's own harder rework under his original artist name.

• Signum Remix (2000)

  Northern Irish duo Signum's peak-time rebuild for Kontor.

9 PM opened the door commercially for the entire late-1990s wave of German uplifting trance in the UK market. Sash!, Fragma, Rank 1 and Kai Tracid all had UK Top 10 singles in the two years after 9 PM landed, and none of them would have been signed as fast without ATB's proof of concept. Tanneberger himself was voted world's #14 DJ by DJ Magazine in 2000 and has remained a fixture of the European touring circuit ever since. The four-note talkbox phrase is one of the two or three most-sampled dance-music leads of the 1990s.

• The 'till I come' vocal is a chopped sample from an obscure US disco 12-inch Tanneberger has never publicly identified.
• ATB was still working his Woolworths shifts the week the record entered the UK Top 10.
• The talkbox lead has been officially sampled in over 30 subsequent records, including a 2019 hyperpop edit by 100 gecs.