Bb minor · Camelot 3A · 132 BPM
Don't Give Up
by Chicane
- 132
- BPM
- Bb minor
- Key
- 3A
- Camelot
- 68
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
Chicane had written the music for a track that still needed a voice when he played the idea to Bryan Adams, who agreed to sing it and then wrote the melody and lyrics himself. The pairing had begun the previous year, in 1999, when Adams contacted Chicane at his studio to arrange a remix of "Cloud Number 9", a single from his 1998 album On a Day Like Today. That remix became the radio edit and reached number six on the UK chart, opening the door to a full collaboration.
Adams's rock-styled vocals were buried in heavy audio processing, done with Prosoniq's OrangeVocoder plugin inside Steinberg's Cubase VST. Even electronically altered, his voice remained recognisable. Pete Tong first played the white label single on his BBC Radio 1 Essential Selection show on 31 December 1999, naming it "Essential New Tune for the millennium", and Judge Jules later gave it the same honour on a January show while standing in.
Released on 6 March 2000 as the second single from Behind the Sun, "Don't Give Up" overtook Madonna's "American Pie" at the top of the UK Singles Chart during the week of 12 March, outselling it by 1224 copies. It gave Chicane his first UK number one and Adams his second, after "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You" in 1991. The single sold 270,000 copies in the UK.
Don't Give Up runs at 132 BPM, the tempo of techno, trance and big-room dance. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.82 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 455 ms. It is in Bb minor, Camelot 3A, which shares its notes with Db major and mixes cleanly with Eb minor and F minor.
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