Pilgrem's Latest Tracks Cleverly Mesh Virtual & Real Instruments
By Justin Hampton
Published in the January 2005 issue of DJ Times Magazine
Volume 18 - Number 01


From the early days of hardcore to the New Skool scene, UK breaks pioneer Rennie Pilgrem has seen or helped shape nearly every mutation of the genre. Now, with the ongoing success of his TCR label and his monthly London club night Hum—which he helms with Meat Katie—Pilgrem has been pegged as the “go-to” guy for a variety of projects beyond the dance-music realm—one for a television advert, another for the soundtrack for the UK film, “The Football Factory,” which used a remixed version of his track, “A Place Called Acid.”

But it’s his second artist album, Pilgremage, that has most breakbeat devotees excited, and this time Pilgrem’s studio approach incorporates his growing respect for live instrumentation. The opening track “Attention” features live drums, supplied by Richard Thair of Red Snapper, and a live double bass. These live elements—alongside sax solos provided by Andrew Spence and guitar passages supplied by Chris Carter—were often sent to Pilgrem as audio files, which he would later run through his Mackie 38 mixing desk into a Mac running Logic Audio.

Generally, Pilgrem “works from the beats up” with his productions, unless he has a clever sample in mind, and will integrate his sound sources with the myriad of beats and samples he’s assembled in Logic Audio. Most of the tweaking he does from there, he says, will be to make the instruments sound more natural. “I find myself taking off stuff, because a lot of it can get in the way of the original,” he says. “Like a drumbeat. If you had a really strong, powerful beat and the more you start putting plug-ins in it, you’ll lose the raw, direct thump of it all.”

As for studio gear, Pilgrem again focused on a handful of programs and synths to give him what he wanted. Original demos were recorded mainly onto Logic Audio, and he later became enamored with the interfaces and sonic capabilities of Apple’s Soundtrack software, which he calls, “Apple’s version of Acid.” On top of that, he mainly used two keyboards for all the tracks: the Roland JP-8000, which supplied many of the sounds on the LP—”You can design sounds pretty much to order on [it],” he says—and the Korg M-1 as his master keyboard. “It’s better to have a five-octave [range for your master] and it’s a solid keyboard for that,” he says of the M-1. “I don’t believe in having a tiny little keyboard for that.”

Pilgrem also uses a pod effects box traditionally used for guitar and bass effects to distort the sounds before bringing them into Logic. “Because you’ve got the knobs physically on it, you can tweak it, and say, ‘That sounds really right.’ Then you go onto audio. Whereas if it was a plug-in, let’s say there’s eight different parameters, you’ve only got one mouse, so you’re having to tweak one bit at a time and, often, you can get lost.”

Oddly enough, considering Pilgrem’s current production procedures, the acid sound on the “Acid, Pt. 3” tracks from “The Football Factory” soundtrack was made on the JP-8000, not the 303. “Yes, I should have done it on the real thing,” says Pilgrem sheepishly. “In an extra week, I could have. [But] doing something for film, it’s like, ‘We need it tomorrow.’ I’d been on a [tour in] Australia, come back, and was given about four days to totally recreate a tune I did 10 years ago with only two or three of the original samples. That’s when I was using the Roland S750 sampler. None of the original stuff was there at all.”

All that gear talk might sound heavy to up-and-coming producers, but Pilgrem says that, after years of making his own tracks and remixing material from other artists, it’s the simple studio approach that works best for him and keeps him inspired. “Often if you can’t find the right sound,” he says, “then you can bend sounds through a million plug-ins as often as you like, but often the original thing can sound [just as] good. I’m into things sounding raw again. I’m anti things sounding overly produced.”