PIT Productions has a state of the art digital recording facility. The studio is the product of an ongoing dream, which we are still building on day by day, by investing most of the studio's profit into making it a facility we can be even prouder of. This, combined with the passion with which we operate the studio, makes it a facility anyone will quickly feel right at home in. This is where we work, live and play, and we invite you to do the same.
PIT Productions is currently the technical driving force behind the Revolutionary Afrikaans Industrial band NuL. All of NuL's studio work is done in the PIT studio, as Adriaan Pelzer and Simon Kruger are the founding members of NuL. PIT Productions also produces Radio Advertisements for radio stations like OFM and Mpower FM, and we often do custom musical compositions for corporate videos, architectural animations, TV series, or just for fun.
The beginnings of the PIT Productions studio can be traced back to when PIT Productions was just a theatre company run by Mareli Minnaar. (PIT is an acronym for Professional Intelligent Theatre). Adriaan Pelzer was responsible for most of PIT Productions' audio needs on early productions, which consisted mainly of smallish theatre productions.
These productions took off in a big way with the hugely successful Afrikaans Comedy show Zef Sketse, which was mainly performed in bars and pubs, and had the viral marketing underground buzzing with excitement. Zef Sketse relied heavily on sound cues being triggered interactively with the action on stage, and the format thus included the sound engineer on stage.
The studio went corporate with PIT Productions' involvement in the series Blikskottel on KykNet in 2003, for which Adriaan Pelzer composed the theme tune, did all audio cleaning, post production and final mix. He worked alongside Pluto Panoussis, who acted as both director and editor on Blikskottel.
Later, in 2006, the studio was solely responsible for all sound design, composition, editing, foley art and final mix on the hit TV series Kompleks on SABC2, again in conjunction with Pluto Panoussis. A notable fact is that Adriaan Pelzer and Simon Kruger composed all of the background music in the series, without resorting to the use of any library music whatsoever.
The PIT Productions sound studio was conceived and is run by Adriaan Pelzer and Simon Kruger. Their involvement in sound is bred out of their love for music and audio.
Adriaan Pelzer has been involved in music since early childhood, and his schooling was dominated by formal music training, Symphony Orchestras, Marching Bands and Wind Bands. After school he satisfied his love for the nature sciences by studying Electronic Engineering at the University of Pretoria. In his final year he wrote a well-received thesis on the perceptual differences between analog audio on Vinyl Records and digital audio on Compact Disc, called High-Fidelity perception of Digital Sound (University of Pretoria, 1996). During this time he and Simon Kruger met as founding members of the Avant Garde Rock band Nothing. From 2004 - 2006 Adriaan moved to Singapore, where he honed his musical composition abilities further and started publishing his work on the Internet. This finally led to NuL as it exists in its current form, but that's an altogether different story.
Simon Kruger spent the second half of his high school career being much more interested in music than his actual classes, and after leaving school, applied his studies directly to his career in music by studying Jazz at the Pretoria Technikon under masters like Mark Dube, Kevin Davidson, Wessel van Rensburg and others. While at the Technikon, he became involved in various diverse musical projects, all experimental in nature, including Signal To Noise, which veered from thrash metal to acapella gospel, Raboobee, an experimental jazz/rock/funk band strongly influenced by Frank Zappa and was also the bass player for the live incarnation of the infamous 'Die Naaimasjiene', who specialised in some of the most over the top shows ever to grace the stages of South Africa. Around this time, he and Adriaan Pelzer met as founding members of the seminal Avant Garde Rock Band Nothing, together with fellow students Kotie Geldenhuys, Theo Wolmarans and Kobie van Tonder. After Nothing broke up in 1998, Simon and Adriaan started experimenting with computer music and digital sound generation and manipulation, and thus started the journey that led to the PIT Productions studio as it is today.
During this time Simon Kruger became involved in Sshhh, a more mainstream, but still experimental and very conceptual trip hop band, who acheived a margin of commercial success, including the release of an album entitled Listen produced by Craig Dodds. After Sshhh broke up, Simon Kruger moved to the UK for two and a half years, where he continued to experiment with music and honed his composition and productions skills.
Finally, the years of experimentation by both Adriaan and Simon came to fruition in the band NuL, and the PIT Productions Sound Studio, the two of which are integral parts of each other. All of their musical endeavors are earmarked by their ability to transcend genres and to willingly step out into unchartered territory, to boldly go where no man has gone before.