PinkPantheress on Sampling, Speed, and the MIDI Controller She Never Used Before

PinkPantheress revealed the deliberately simple methods behind her earliest music during a conversation on the In Proximity podcast. The discussion traces a line from sample-heavy bedroom experiments to her recent Brit Award for Producer of the Year, but it opens with a basic misunderstanding about how gear works.

“When I first started, I had a lot of songs that I really wanted to sample,” she said. “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.” Her process meant taking a finished track, changing its tempo, and adding new parts directly over the source material, a form of production that relied more on instinct than on equipment.

That equipment stayed minimal for a reason. PinkPantheress hadn’t used a MIDI controller until a lightbulb moment she described on the podcast. “I’d never used a MIDI controller in my life like that. Before then I was just using my keyboard on my laptop, and I thought that was the only way to do it.” The realization didn’t just change her technical setup—it marked a shift in how she understood what was possible inside a track.

The interview arrives at a point where her catalog already resists easy classification, pulling from garage, drum and bass, and pop without settling into one lane. Looking back at the laptop-keyboard days, the initial constraint reads not as a limitation but as a genuine starting point, one that shaped a sound recognizable enough to end up on a Brits stage five years later.