Session notes: how Burial made Untrue, from what he said in 2007

Untrue is often held up as proof that a landmark electronic record can come out of a bedroom. What is more useful is how deliberately limited the method was. Burial gave very few interviews around the album, and two of them are now readable in full: Mark Fisher's for The Wire, whose unedited transcript The Wire later put online, and Dan Hancox's for The Guardian, whose full transcript Hancox published in 2025 (The Quietus, Hancox). Everything below comes from those. Where he did not say something, we do not guess.

The rig

Very little. Burial told The Wire he worked in Sound Forge, a wave editor, rather than a sequencer, saying arrangement screens are "blocks in different colours and I'm only used to just seeing the waves". He added: "Also because I don't know how to use them!" To Hancox he described "a really rubbish computer, I can't even move it, so I haven't got much choice", and said he had "been in a studio four times". In The Wire he mentions losing tunes "because my computer's dead".

How the tracks came together

1. Drums by eye. "I don't need to listen much to the drums because I know they look nice," he told The Wire. With no grid, the swing comes from where he placed the waveforms.
2. Found percussion. "A lot of my drums are just people picking up new ammo and weapons in games" (The Wire). To Hancox he said every tune on the album has "the same drum sound — it's just the sound of my brother's lighter", and that one repeated jangle came from "some budget Vin Diesel film".
3. Vocals across gender. "I like pitching down female vocals so they sound male, and pitching up male vocals so they sound like a girl singing" (The Wire). He told Hancox the record was "full of pitched-up vocals".
4. Texture as cover. Of the rain and crackle: "I partly use the rain to cover up the lameness of my tunes" (The Wire). He told Hancox he preferred tape crackle to vinyl crackle.
5. Fast, and at night. He told Hancox: "I actually made the whole thing in the space of a week, albeit spread out a bit over that time", and "I would literally sit around waiting for night to fall." Hyperdub announced the album for November 2007.

What we think a home producer can take from it

• A constraint can be the style. Without a grid, the drums could not be quantised, and the unquantised shuffle is a large part of how the record sounds. Try a session where you place hits by hand in an audio editor and stop when it looks and feels right.
• Pitch is an identity tool, not just a tuning tool. Moving a voice across gender turns a borrowed vocal into a new character. That is more interesting than clean correction, and it is a stock feature in every DAW.
• Your sample library is your life. A lighter, a film, a game. Record what is around you before buying packs.
• Texture can hide, and that is fine. Burial said the rain covers what he thought was weak. Atmosphere that glues rough parts together is a legitimate decision, not cheating, as long as you know you are doing it.
• Speed protects the mood. A record made in about a week, at night, keeps one emotional temperature. Long projects drift; short ones can stay coherent.

The caveat: Burial's self-deprecation ("I'm only messing around", he told Hancox) should not be read as a lack of skill. The method looks simple; the ear behind it is the rare part, and survivorship makes any single record look more planned than it was.