How to sound like Burial
Chop and pitch a vocal, place your drums off the grid by hand so they stumble a little, then run the whole thing through Memory Station on a hazy mood with the Haze knob pushed up for the crackle, filtering and distance.
I get asked about the Burial sound more than almost anything else, usually by people who have spent a weekend layering rain samples and still cannot figure out why their track sounds clean and his sounds like it was pulled out of a puddle at 3am. The good news is that most of what makes it work is technique, not gear, and the small amount of gear you do need can be free. Here is how I think about it.
A short history of the Burial sound
Burial is William Bevan, a producer from South London who stayed anonymous for years before his identity became public. The two records everyone points to are Burial from 2006 and Untrue from 2007, and Untrue is the one that really defined the whole thing for most listeners. The short version is that he took UK garage and dubstep, the music of London clubs, and made it sound like the walk home instead of the night out. Rain, empty streets, buses going past, that kind of nocturnal feeling.
The detail that gets repeated the most, and that Bevan has talked about in interviews over the years, is that he made these records by hand in Sound Forge, which is a stereo audio editor, not a normal beat grid style DAW. So instead of snapping every drum hit to a grid, he was placing sounds by eye on a waveform. That is a big part of why the drums have that loose, slightly drunk swing where nothing lands quite where a quantized machine would put it. It sounds human because a human actually nudged every piece into place.
How the sound is made
For a band I would talk about players and gear here. For an electronic artist like this, the ingredients are the techniques and the source material. Based on his own interviews and the way the records have been picked apart by producers over the years, here is what tends to be going on. I am hedging a little because nobody outside his room knows the exact chain, but these elements show up again and again.
- Pitched and time-stretched vocal snippets. Tiny fragments of vocals, often from other records, pitched up or down and stretched until the gender and the words blur. They end up sounding sighing and androgynous, more like a feeling than a lyric.
- A constant bed of noise. Vinyl crackle, rain, and found sounds run underneath almost the whole track. It never fully goes quiet, and that hiss is doing a lot of emotional work.
- Sub bass. Deep, round low end that you feel more than hear, sitting under everything without fighting the top.
- Hand-placed drums. Off-grid percussion with a stumbling swing, clicks and snaps and shakers that never quite line up, which is exactly the point.
- Heavy filtering and reverb. Everything sounds distant and wet, like it is being heard through a wall or across a parking lot in the rain. The high end is often rolled off so nothing feels close or dry.
If you internalize just one thing from that list, make it the last two. Distance and imperfection are the whole aesthetic. A pristine, forward, on-the-grid version of these same parts would sound like a completely different, much less interesting record.
How to get it: the Siesta plugin chain
The Burial chain, in the box
- Chop and pitch a vocal. Grab a short vocal phrase, cut it into little pieces, and pitch or stretch them until the words stop being words. You want a sigh, not a sentence.
- Place drums by hand, off the grid. Turn quantize off. Nudge each hit slightly early or late by ear so the groove stumbles. Keep the kit small and quiet, more clicks and shakers than big drums.
- Run the whole thing through Memory Station. Put the free Memory Station '03 across the mix or a bus, pick a hazy mood, then push the Haze knob up until the crackle, filtering, noise bed and distance settle over everything. Layer rain or room noise underneath to finish the bed.
That is genuinely most of it. The vocal and the drum placement give you the human, off-kilter feeling. Memory Station gives you the wet, hissy, filtered-through-a-wall atmosphere in one move, because that is exactly what it was built to do.
Memory Station '03 turns a recording into a memory
A whole lo-fi atmosphere machine that lives inside a chat window from 2003. Pick a mood and it reconfigures the tape drift, haze, noise and reverb behind it, then push Haze until the daylight comes out of it. A real plugin, not a demo, and always free.
Get Memory Station · Free →Dialing it in
A few things I would keep in mind once you have the basic chain running. These are the difference between something that sounds like a rain sample over a beat and something that actually has that late-night pull.
- Swing off the grid. Resist the urge to tighten the drums. If a hit sounds a touch wrong, it is probably right. The stumble is the feeling.
- Keep it dark and wet. Roll off the highs, drown things in reverb, and let the vocals and percussion sit back in the mix instead of up front. Nothing should feel close or dry.
- Let noise fill the silence. Never let the track go fully quiet. A steady bed of crackle, hiss or rain underneath everything is what makes the empty spaces feel like a place instead of a gap.
- Commit to the mood. Pick one emotional register, usually somewhere between lonely and hopeful, and let every choice serve it. This music lives or dies on tone, not on complexity.
If this whole hazy, half-remembered approach speaks to you, it is worth spending time with the same instincts applied to melody rather than rhythm. A lot of what I said here about noise and distance also shows up in the Boards of Canada guide, just pointed at warm synths and childhood tape instead of nocturnal garage. The two sit right next to each other on the shelf in my head.
None of this requires expensive plugins or a fancy room. It requires patience with placement and a willingness to make things sound worse in the technical sense so they feel better in the human one. Start with a vocal you love, break it, and let the hiss carry it home.