Kyrre Gørvell-Dahll also known as Kygo is a Norwegian music producer and DJ. He works primarily on various sub-genres of house music such as deep house, progressive house, and deep house. He also works on downtempo. Deceased Swedish DJ Avicii is his primary musical influence.
He was born in Singapore and traveled quite a lot as a youngster. He spent time in Kenya, Brazil, Egypt, and Japan with his family. He was introduced to music as the young of 6, at which he began taking piano lessons. The lessons stopped when he reached 15.
By the time he was 16, he had started producing music on his computer using the Logic Studio software and a MIDI keyboard. He learned techniques via YouTube.
He has since gone on to release two official studio albums; Cloud Nine and Kids in Love. Both albums were commercially successful and charted in various countries. He has also released an EP titled Stargazing which charted in Australia, Sweden, and the USA.
He achieved international fame after releasing his remix of I See Fire which was originally sung by Ed Sheeran. The track attained tens of millions of streams on various platforms. His song, Firestone went on to get more than 1 billion streams on YouTube and Spotify combined.
In his short professional career, he has garnered more than 25 award nominations including multiple MTV Europe Music Award, Billboard Music Awards, various Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards, YouTube Music Awards, International Dance Music Awards and WDM Radio Awards.
The vast majority of his music has been released via the Ultra and RCA labels. As of March 2018, Billboard ranked Kygo third on the Billboard Dance 100 list.
He has collaborated with various artists including Imagine Dragons, John Legend, Selena Gomez, OneRepublic, Miguel, and Labrinth.
Kygo’s performance during the closing ceremony at the 2016 Rio Olympics was the first time a house music producer performed at such an event.
Kygo uses a reasonable amount of hardware when creating his music. He’s been spotted playing a Yamaha Grand piano, a Steinway & Sons Model D concert grand piano as well as a Zimmerman Upright piano.
Hardware synthesizers he owns or has used include a Yamaha CP300, Nord Stage 2 88-key keyboard, Novation UltraNova synth, Minimoog Voyager, Roland AIRA SYSTEM-1 synth, as well as a Roland Juno-60.
He uses other MIDI controllers such as an M-Audio Oxygen 49, Akai MPK261 and Arturia KeyLab 88.
Kygo has been spotted using an Akai EIE Pro as well as an Avid M-Audio MobilePre audio interface. Software instruments in his arsenal include reFX Nexus 2 and Sylenth1.
Beats by Dre Mixr and Audio-Technica ATH-M50x headphones are among the headphones Kygo uses for monitoring audio. On the speaker side, he’s been known to use the Yamaha HS7 and KRK Rokit 6 G3 studio monitors.