No Sequencer, No Excuses: What Burial's Untrue Teaches Every Bedroom Producer

Two Weeks, One Audio Editor, Five People Who Knew

Here's the part most producers skip: before Untrue, Burial already had a second album's worth of dark tunes ready. "I took ages on them," he told The Wire. Then he binned the lot to make what he called "a glowing record" instead. Most artists would cling to months of work. He walked away from it and started again.

What came next was fast. By his own account, he "sort of did the whole album in about two weeks, most of it in the final week." Archangel, the track most people know him for, reportedly came together in around 20 minutes after his mum told him to "just do a tune." No overthinking. No 47 versions of the same hook.

And he did it anonymously. Only a handful of people knew who he was. It wasn't until July 2008, when Untrue was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize, that he finally posted on MySpace: "My name's Will Bevan, I'm from South London… I just want it to be all about the tunes." That line says everything. No persona, no gear flex, no content strategy. Just the music.

Whose Voice Is That? How the Untrue Sound Actually Works

Burial built Untrue in Sound Forge, a stereo audio editor, not a music sequencer. Where most producers see "blocks in different colours" on a grid, he said, "I'm only used to just seeing the waves." He arranged by eye, nudging drum hits around the waveform until the pattern looked "like a fishbone." That's a big reason his beats feel loose and human. They're placed by feel, not snapped to a grid.

The vocals are the other half of the magic. He took low-quality acappellas, cut them into brand-new sentences, then pitched the female voices down and the male voices up. The result sits in a strange middle zone where you can't tell who's singing. That ambiguity is the emotion. It sounds like a memory of a song rather than the song itself.

Try both ideas tonight in any DAW. Turn off snap-to-grid and drag your hi-hats and snares slightly early or late until the groove breathes. Grab a vocal sample, chop it into single words or syllables, rearrange them into a new phrase, then pitch it a few semitones against its natural range. Layer in some vinyl crackle or rain ambience underneath, and you're already in the right neighbourhood.

Build Your Own Night-Bus Studio: The Gear That Gets You There

Start with how you hear and capture sound, because Burial's style lives in tiny details: crackle, reverb tails, ghostly vocal fragments. A clean, simple interface like the Audient iD4 MKII gets audio in and out of your laptop without fuss. Pair it with closed-back headphones like the Audio-Technica ATH-M50x for late-night sessions when the house is asleep, and a pair of Yamaha HS5 monitors to check that your sub-bass and atmospheres actually translate.

Next, the chopping. If you want to work hands-on and away from the mouse, the Roland SP-404MKII is built for exactly this kind of music: sample a vocal, chop it, pitch it, resample it, and drown it in lo-fi effects. Prefer an MPC workflow? The Akai MPC Sample and MPC One G2 let you finger-drum loose, unquantised 2-step grooves that feel played, not programmed.

Finally, texture. A big part of the Untrue mood is the world around the music: rain, traffic, distant voices, the hum of a city at 3am. A handheld recorder like the Zoom H6studio lets you capture your own field recordings, whether that's a downpour in PJ, a late LRT platform or a mamak at closing time. Layer those under your beats and the track instantly feels like it belongs to a place. Your place.

Stop Waiting for the Perfect Setup

Untrue wasn't made with the best gear. It was made with the gear Burial had, a clear feeling he was chasing, and the guts to bin a whole album and start over. The lesson isn't "buy a sampler and you'll sound like Burial." It's that your ears, your taste and your willingness to finish something matter more than any spec sheet. The right tools just remove the friction.

So open a session tonight, chop a voice, drag a snare off the grid, record the rain outside your window, and finish one tune. And when you're ready to build the setup around your sound, come jam with us at Music Bliss. By musicians, for musicians.