Frank Dukes

Adam King Feeney (born September 12, 1983), better known as Ging and by his former stage name Frank Dukes, is a Canadian musician, record producer, and songwriter.

A prolific producer, he has worked with artists including Lorde for Melodrama, Camila Cabello ("Havana," "Never Be the Same," "My Oh My"), Post Malone ("Congratulations," "Better Now," Circles") and The Weeknd ("Call Out My Name"). Following a two decade production career, he retired as Frank Dukes in 2021 to pursue his own music and art as Ging; he released his debut solo album We're Here, My Dear in 2022.

In his early career, Feeney established himself as a producer by working with a number of members of Wu-Tang Clan and G-Unit as well as young Toronto talent like BADBADNOTGOOD.

Adam King Feeney was born on September 12, 1983, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and was raised in the city's northern suburb of Thornhill.

His first exposure to creating music was piano lessons at age five; however, he quit lessons after three years due to losing interest in it.

He later taught himself to play guitar, bass and drums.

As a teenager, he spent a lot of time skateboarding and gained more interest in music, particularly New York hip hop, becoming a DJ at 15 years old.

In 1999, at age 16, Feeney began collecting records from the 1960s and 1970s in an effort to understand how they were made.

This habit got him into record production and he bought an MPC the following year.

Feeney began producing music seriously in the early 2000s.

He chose the stage name Frank Dukes as a teenager, inspired by the character of Frank Dux in the martial arts film Bloodsport, and competed in a number of local DJ contents.

In the late 2000s, Feeney would produce a number of tracks for G-Unit rappers Lloyd Banks and 50 Cent.

At the end of the 2000s, Feeney connected with Wu-Tang member Ghostface Killah, producing three tracks for his 2010 album Apollo Kids.

He graduated from St. Robert Catholic High School in Thornhill in 2001.

Feeney has stated that he had no intention to make music his profession.

His first production credit was a 2003 remix for Philadelphia rapper Hezekiah and he later had his first paid placement with a Toronto artist named General Too Smooth.

In 2005, he connected with Toronto-based music manager Mo' Jointz who found Duke placements with Toronto and New York-area hip hop artists, including Slaughterhouse's Joell Ortiz, Kool G Rap, and Choclair.

Feeney was one of the first producers to work with Drake, producing the track "Money" off his debut mixtape Room for Improvement, released in 2006.

Feeney's relationship with producer Boi-1da, who would become one of the in-house producers for Drake's OVO Sound label, has led to many collaborations for Drake since this time.

In 2008 and 2009, he took part in the Red Bull Big Tune producer competition; at these events, he connected with a number of artists and their A&R, most notably G-Unit, Danny Brown, and Wu-Tang Clan's Ghostface Killah.

This included his first paid placement for a major artist, the song "Sooner or Later (Die 1 Day)" on Banks' third studio album H.F.M. 2 (The Hunger for More 2), for which Feeney was $5,000 paid in 2008, among other tracks released years later.

Creative relationships and album production

The two met after Feeney won the Red Bull Big Tune championship in 2009; Feeney had also given Ghost a beat tape the previous year.

He came to prominence in the 2010s as a composer and beatmaker whose work was utilized by prominent record producers to sample in their own productions; many of his samples have been used in songs for major artists including Drake (with Feeneys' major placement, "0 to 100"), Travis Scott, Taylor Swift, and Kanye West, with some drawing from the Kingsway Music Library, a popular sample library which he has run since 2011.

Feeney performed as his and Cappadonna's tour DJ; active as a DJ in Toronto, Feeney also played sets during their tour as well as at the 2010 CMJ Music Marathon in New York City.

Inspired in part by his experiences working in 2010/2011 with the Menahan Street Band, a contemporary funk and soul ensemble that employ vintage recording techniques (and achieve the 1960s/1970s sound and style so often sought after in hip hop samples), Feeney began recording his compositions similarly, using vintage and analog equipment.

During the same period, Feeney met the Canadian hip hop/jazz group BADBADNOTGOOD at their first live show in 2011.

This relationship led to a series of Wu-Tang-related collaborations over the following five years, including producing more than half the tracks for the RZA-produced The Man with the Iron Fists album in 2012.

He also worked on his own unreleased album, collaborating with Danny Brown and Willie the Kid, among others.

Observing the sample clearance issues and poor royalty splits he experienced while working with 50 Cent and Ghostface, Feeney had the idea of using his body of work as samples for other record producers to use, much like the traditional library music model, and began sharing his work with the likes of Vinylz, DJ Dahi, and Boi-1da; beginning in 2013, he packaged a portion of his compositions into various volumes for a collection titled Kingsway Music Library which he sells with the clearance of his samples guaranteed.

Feeney has helped produce over thirty platinum singles since 2014.

Among other awards and nominations, Feeneys' work has won four Grammy Awards from 32 nominations.

He is considered one of Canada's top producers having been awarded Songwriter of the Year by SOCAN four times and has received similar honors from BMI, the Juno Awards, Variety, and Jaxsta.

Feeney and the group became close collaborators, even sharing a studio for many years; the band members play on many of the samples Feeney produced during the decade and, in turn, Feeney produced their first original album III, released in 2014.

This sample production work created acclaim for Feeney in 2014 when a composition he wrote was given to Boi-1da and flipped into the Drake single "0 to 100."

From this point forward, he was inspired to grow Kingsway Music Library into an established platform for original music for sampling.

He continues to distribute a limited amount of his music this way and invites up-and-coming musicians to collaborate or contribute whole volumes to his platform.

Feeney' work with Ghostface and BBNG culminated in their shared 2015 record, Sour Soul.

Kingsway Music Library and sample composition

During the first half of the decade, Feeney began writing music that he could use and manipulate as samples in his own work, much like the traditional record sampling he took part in as a hip hop producer.