Mr Virgo Holy Grime, Wiley ft. Devlin
Nottingham’s Mr Virgo, AKA Matthew Virgo is one of bassline house and grime’s biggest beatmakers with production credits for the likes of JME, Giggs and P Money amongst others. Future Music caught up with Matt in Oxford’s Evolution Studios to find out how he created his epic instrumental, and how it ended up providing the basis for Wiley ft. Devlin’s apocalyptic Holy Grime, from last year’s Godfather LP.
How did Holy Grime come about?
“I made the beat a while ago and I could hear Wiley on it, so I just sent him the beat. Within the next hour or so he rang me back all excited wanting to vocal it. I’d say after a week of him having the beat he came back with the track. It didn’t have Devlin on it then, so we had to send it back to get it vocalled by Devlin.”
How come Devlin got featured on the track?
“I don’t know his reasons for having Devlin in on it. They had a feud back in the day… my guess it that probably it was just to tie ‘em back up together and consolidate their long-lost friendship!”
Wiley can be a controversial character. Was this your first time working with him? What was it like?
“It was incredible: he’s someone I’ve always looked up to, someone that’s always inspired me to make beats and even to pursue my career as a producer, because he’s a producer as well as an MC. I try not to look at the politics and the negative things that surround someone’s name. I’m just there to work with them and make good music. There was no fuss, it was a pleasure to work with him and I’m glad that I did!”
What was the inspiration behind the instrumental?
“When I make beats I like to make them sound very heroic and epic. I just got the first chords going with the choir samples and the strings and built it off there from the energy alone.”
So you’ll start with the musical side of it rather than the drums?
“Yeah, I can feel music more than drums if that makes sense. So
usually I’ll start off with melodies with an instrument like a string or something and then I’ll just build from there. I can’t really explain why I chose those instruments straight off the top, it just came from my mind!”
In the video you talk about tuning your drums to the music.
“Yeah 100%, if your drums aren’t on point it can make or break a track. The first drum beat I laid on it didn’t sound the way I wanted it to sound, so it took a while to mould it. It took a day or two to get it perfect.”
In your music there’s a lot of orchestral influences, where does that come from?
“I love films, your old-type films with big soundtracks like Edward
Scissorhands and particularly the composer Danny Elfman. I draw a lot of inspiration from songs in movies, so you could say they’re a big influence on my music.
“You don’t have to stick to the rules in grime when it comes to producing. You just do what comes to mind and put a really heavy gritty beat over it at 140bpm!”
How do you go about finding the right sounds?
“I hunt for hours, I’ll spend days making tracks and I will also spend days just hunting through sample banks and recording tracks off TV into my sound card, sampling, chopping, arranging.”
Grime always used to be rough and gritty, but recently tracks have polished elements too. How do you keep it sounding authentic?
“What’s important is to arrange the tracks the right way – things have to hit properly and you need to have a decent mixdown so the listener can hear it.”
On vocal tracks where you just make the beat, it can’t be easy to test tracks on a club system before committing to a final version?
“So I had to get the mixdown on the beat pretty bang-on before I sent it out to Wiley. When I sent him the parts, he took it away to get it mastered. As I didn’t really deal with the mastering on this one I had to get it to a certain standard before I sent it out to him!”
For this track you used Reason. Do you use that for everything?
“There are three main programs I use: Reason, Logic and Fruity Loops. Depending on what track I want to make, I will use a different program each time. So if I want to make a gritty hard-hitting grime tune I’ll use Reason for that, because I can get that sound out of Reason. If I want to do something a bit more polished, a bit more commercial than I use Logic Pro. Fruity Loops is a bit more in-between, more on the hip-hop side of things.”