between the lines my fate was burned
Close look to my process of creating a track.
Somehow my note of a tape loop I made at the end of last year gained quite a bit of interest, so I thought to share openly my creative process for creating a track. This time around I am not in a fancy University studio, but in my comfy home studio where most of my projects comes alive. The process with this track and the tape loop one are pretty similar; sample something, cut it up, stitch it up, throw there some effects until it sounds beautiful.
When I was finished with this track, I opened a poetry book by Arseny Tarkovsky and stumbled upon a line between the lines my fate was burned and that was the name for this track. It’s dark, it’s drone, it’s ambient.
19:37 9/1/2025 — 20:22 10/1/2025
The first date & time on the heading is when I captured the sample and the second one is when I had finished recording it to my DAW.
Alright, here’s a picture of my “studio”. I would say this is the setup I use for most of my projects. A laptop with Reaper DAW, SP-404MKII sampler and Zoom H5 recorder. Sometimes I use Arturia Minilab3 MIDI keyboard and that’s about it for my equipment, nothing fancy.
between the lines my fate was burned is based on one classical music sample, which is 13 seconds in length. I sampled it from radio directly to my SP, so I don’t know which song it’s from. Here’s the sample looped a few times, it is beautiful, maybe some of you might recognize it.
Some may find working this way — using uncleared samples — unethical, but I find it really fun. And I take fun over unethical with this one.
After finding the sample, I started to chop it up with my sampler. I came up with five different chops, slowing and pitching them down and reversing some of them. Here’s all those chops played after each other.
After this, it was time for effects. I did a little filtering for the first sample at around 1000Hz, cutting out high frequencies to create a nice deep, bass-heavy drone. That was all the EQing I did for the piece.
Other chops didn’t receive any individual processing, but the tracks as a whole did. SP-404MKII has four different fx buses and I added a SX Reverb effect to the end of the line, so BUS 4, because I knew I wanted to run everything through reverb eventually. I turned it fully wet and maxed out the time. To BUS 2 I added 303 Vinyl Sim for compression, which I turned up to 83 where it sounded good to my taste. BUS 1 had this cool delay & reverb effect Ko-Da-Ma, which I used as a performance effect while recording the piece to Reaper. I don’t really know much how anything works, but I just try different things out until it sounds good to my ear.
For the recording itself I didn’t have 100% clear plan. I knew the deep drone was going to be my main loop and the others would complement it. I faded other loops one by one, slowly in and out of the mix, keeping them rather quiet in the background. As I was performing, one of the loops on the higher frequency range started to sound really cool, and it eventually took over as the main loop towards the end.
That’s how this piece came together. If any of you may have further questions, I’m glad to try to answer them, and if you have any comments, I’m glad to hear them. Here’s the final result:
miska lamberg - between the lines my fate was burned