Miles Bonham heard the opening vocal of ‘Bring Me to Life’ for the first time and immediately reached for a synth pluck, a trap hat, and an arpeggiator. The nine-year-old producer had no idea he was about to reconstruct a rock anthem from scratch using nothing but instinct, a DAW, and a confident theory that the mystery song was from the early 2000s. What he built instead was something that sounded nothing like the original and, by his own admission, was closer to it than he ever expected.
Chords first, genre later
The challenge was simple: listen to the mystery track once, then produce an original version with complete creative freedom, no genre hints, no artist name, no second listen. Miles sat down, heard Amy Lee’s vocals drift through the room, and within seconds had a working theory. ‘I’m guessing this was made in the 2000s or early 2010s,’ he said, zeroing in on the sonic texture before a single chord was placed. He pulled up Serum, found a pluck he liked, and locked in what he called ‘a very R&B progression.’
From there, the session moved fast. He chopped the vocal sample, added a manual crossfade, dropped in Auto-Tune in graph mode, and began adjusting velocities by hand. When he stumbled onto a particular synth run, he stopped mid-sentence. ‘That’s so cool,’ he said, half to himself. A drum search followed, and he landed on a sample he named ‘Bananas,’ layering it under a trap hat before switching to a triplet grid for the drop. The bro-step section arrived not as a plan but as a pivot: he had separated the chorus to a second track and needed somewhere to take the energy.
The reveal that stopped him cold
Before the original played, he rated his curiosity at a ten. The name of the artist came out slightly garbled in the room, but the song title landed clearly: ‘Bring Me to Life.’ He stared. Then came the guitars.
‘How could this be rock?’ he asked, genuinely puzzled. ‘Wake me up didn’t sound like rock.’ He sat with it for a moment, then reassessed his own work with the kind of analytical honesty that most producers take years to develop. ‘Now that I listened to it, I think the bro-step was literally closer than the first.’ His dad agreed, noting that bro-step is essentially the modern synth version of rock. Miles processed that quietly.
The drum sound he almost skipped
Deep in the session, Miles cycled through a bank of snare samples looking for one he described as sounding a specific kind of rough. He almost moved on before landing on the one labeled ‘Bananas,’ a name that made him laugh but a sound that made him stay.
By the time Evanescence’s guitars finally filled the room, Miles had already built something genuinely his own: an R&B-to-bro-step reconstruction of a rock song he had never heard, complete with a crystallizer effect, a quantized triplet grid, and the quiet confidence of someone who had trusted the chords from the very first bar.
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