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PinkPantheress has been on quite the music production journey. In the space of five years, she’s gone from using samples to make beats in her university bedroom to being named Producer of the Year at The Brit Awards, picking up millions of fans along the way.
Now, in a revealing interview with the In Proximity podcast, Pink has been explaining how her music-making process has changed.
“When I first started, I had a lot of songs that I really wanted to sample,” she says. “Speed up, slow it down. That is a form of production. It’s sampling, but in terms of what I was doing, I was being quite low-lift with it.”
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Explaining further, she says: “So I would take a track, and I would basically take it and then speed it up, slow it down. And then I’d add things to an already existing bit of audio. I would use GarageBand for that. So I would just rip the audio and then cut it up and then add all this stuff to it, and I would add drum loops, and this was what it was at the beginning.
“As time went on, I started to gain a bit more confidence in what I could do, and I also started to collaborate with other people.”
Those people included Mura Masa and Oscar Scheller. “These are producers from the UK, so they have a strong understanding of what my sound is,” says PinkPantheress, but she admits that she was initially reluctant to step outside of her bedroom bubble and go into a studio with them.
“My manager at the time was like, ‘Oh, I want to set you up to do a session.’ I was like, ‘What is a session? Like, I did all this myself – you want me to do a session now?’ I was not offended, but I was like, I don’t want to break this cycle that I’m in of making music my way. And I was all worried and like, I’m gonna hate it. I didn’t know what a session was. I just had no idea.”
Part of this reluctance, she says, came from the fact that she already felt like she already had the production side of things covered with her own skillset. “I’m a producer first, and then vocalist last, or like, second, or whatever. So for me, it was like, ‘Well, what is this for?’”
Fortunately, PinkPantheress’s first experience with Oscar Scheller was a good one, and she quickly realised that collaborating with him and others was going to be beneficial.
“I was like, ‘Wow, he can do things that I want to do, and so, I’m watching them work. I was kind of picking up on what they did.”
“It was very hard for me – I just wanted to do everything myself,” she says later. “But after I collaborated for the first time with Oscar, I was like, yeah, this has to be the norm. It has to be. I mean, there’s a reason it makes your life easier, and I wouldn’t have these songs without these people.”
One moment in particular sticks in PinkPantheress’s mind: when she discovered how useful a MIDI keyboard could be.
“I’d never used a MIDI controller in my life like that. A MIDI controller is like a mini piano, which you can input notes with. Before then I was just using my keyboard on my laptop, and I thought that was the only way to do it. Then I watched them do it. And I was like, ‘Oh, I can just buy a keyboard and do it myself.’”
Asked to explain how she makes her songs now, PinkPantheress says that she has three ways of going about it.
“Some of my songs are songs produced by these producers, which I would then listen to and take, and then I would add my own production on top, or I would manipulate the audio again and then write over that.
“And then some songs are the reverse, where I make basically the whole beat, and then I get a producer to come in and kind of like, add things they think they hear, and then some songs are just me.”
PinkPantheress also says that, although she’s now happy to let other people be involved in her creative process, she likes to keep the circle pretty tight.
“I have a set few producers that I work with,” she confirms. “I only work with about three in rotation. I don’t really stray outside of my three.”
That said, she also accepts that others can find success by taking a different approach. “Some people only work with one producer. Some artists I know only work with one, and then some artists work with everyone – different songs have different producers – and I think all methods work.”
