Hello dear Nauts, I’m trying to recreate these “evil stabs” you can hear at 0’41 on this tune: Burial - South London Boroughs - YouTube I’ve tried to find some tutorials with no success and tried to recreate it on my own with really “meh” results. My weapon of choice would be the Vital vst synth and it has probably something to do with detuned sawtooth waves on 2 or 3 oscillators + processing, but I’m struggling with it. If some of you could help me out, it would be really appreciated (either by a step by step method or a tutorial on youtube or whatever). It’s really frustrating because I don’t think it’s really complicated and it has been a very common sound in electronic music since the 90’s. On the other hand I don’t know if “evil stabs” is the best way to describe or name this kind of sound, but couldn’t come up with a better name for it.
Sounds like sawtooth thru bpf to me, with a bit of envelope modulation on the cutoff. I’d focus on getting the envelopes right first.
Thank you very much. I’ll try that.
It is all heavily processed samples. Burial made this in Sound Forge.
basically sampled from games, mostly Metal Gear
Thanks guys. I believe this type of sounds were around before Burial came up with them, one example I can think of is “Dark metal” (Source Direct remix on Razor Edge series from the Metalheadz label) so mid/late nineties, really similar stabs at some moments and I’m pretty sure I’ve heard it on hardcore techno tunes from this era aswell, so I believe there’s a way to get close to these sounds using some form of synthesis. I don’t want to “copy” Burial sound, just get the basic recipe and try to cook it my own way, so to say.
If in doubt, use a long blade, slide it over a metal surface and record it with a small recorder 
I used to work as a welder for quite a few years, If only I knew back then… 
Sounds like reese bass:
Shameless plug:
That’s a great track actually! <3 Yes I thought about a filtered Reese at first but couldn’t get a similar result. As Darenager mentioned, maybe “get these envelopes right first”. Back to tweaking, I guess^^
The envelopes move a lot, even for such short sounds. Also, all the stabs are slightly different… some sweep up, some down, some down then up. Burial’s a detail devil.
Indeed. I got into his music recently. I mean I knew the name and some tracks he made from the early dubstep days (Benga, Skream etc) but didn’t pay much attention to it when it came out, now I feel a bit ashamed about it. Good point on those moving envelopes aswell 