Miles Bonham did not just cover a song. The 9-year-old sat down at his computer, opened a software synthesizer, and started rebuilding a 1996 hip-hop classic from a layer most listeners have never heard, working backward through three decades of music history before recording a single note of his own. What he pulled off is the kind of musical archaeology that most adult producers never attempt, and it all came down to one decision: instead of borrowing someone else’s sample, he would make his own.
Three songs deep before the beat even starts
The Fugees released ‘Ready or Not’ in 1996, built on a sample of Enya’s 1987 recording ‘Boadicea.’ What most people never realize is that Wyclef Jean’s beat was itself constructed from that Enya track, which Enya had recorded using a Juno 60, a synthesizer popular at the time. Miles wanted to honor the full chain. Rather than lifting Enya’s original recording the way Wyclef did, he decided to first recreate ‘Boadicea’ himself, then sample his own version.
Without a Juno 60, Miles opened Serum, a software wavetable synth, and began shaping the sound from scratch. ‘This is not exactly how Enya sounded,’ he said at one point, adjusting an EQ setting until the tone moved closer to the original’s shimmer. He set his tempo at 101 BPM, locked in his velocities, then turned to the part that defines the Enya original: the layered vocal atmosphere Enya created by stacking her own voice until it sounded like an orchestral instrument. Miles did the same, recording his own vocal layers, running them through reverb and what he called his favorite surround sound setting, then stepping back to listen.
Once the recreation held up, he followed Wyclef’s exact process to flip it: transposing the recording down two semitones and dropping the tempo to 90 BPM. The pitched-down version carries the same haunting quality that made the original Fugees track feel weightless and urgent at once.
Finding the drum kit and finishing the flip
With his sample ready, Miles hunted through drum kits, cycling past several that did not fit before locking one in. He added a delay, automated the delay’s wet signal for movement, then layered in vocals including Lauryn Hill’s verses, which themselves rework lines drawn from a 1968 Delfonics song. By the time he stacked everything and played it back, the three-generation sample chain was intact and entirely his own construction.
His verdict when the playback finished was a single sentence: ‘I think I did it.’
The Serum patch that replaced a 1987 synthesizer
The Juno 60 Miles did not have but needed sits at the center of this whole project. Its tone is what gives ‘Boadicea’ its particular softness, and approximating it inside a modern wavetable synth without the original hardware required Miles to work by ear rather than by spec sheet.
The final track moves through Lauryn Hill’s opening verses, the chorus, and a full outro section, delivered with a relaxed precision that sounds less like a child attempting a famous song and more like a producer who understood exactly what he was building and why each layer belonged there.
The three-song chain, Delfonics to Enya to Fugees, compresses 28 years of recorded music into one beat, and Miles rebuilt it from the bottom up, at 9 years old, one semitone adjustment at a time.
