Check out Taka Perry’s workflow and creativity when making his remix of ‘Ready For The Sky’ by Budjerah.
Budjerah dropped his soulful single ‘Ready For The Sky’ in July this year (2022), and the EP that single came from — Conversations — took out an Aria for Best Soul/R&B release in November 2022.
Taka Perry gave that track a hefty remix using Ableton Live. No stranger to making full use of his studio, he used a tonne of his favourite plugins, synths, samples and he laid down some electric bass to give ‘Ready For The Sky’ a fresh perspective and new life.
Taka Perry opened up his Ableton Live Set to show us his workflow and how he treated the stems he received from Budjerah.
Read on as he talks through his remix of ‘Ready For The Sky’ by Budjerah.
Percussion Synth
“The first sound you hear in the remix is the first part I laid down when making the remix. I wanted this constant polyrhythm to bounce the whole remix off of, so I laid down this super simple MIDI part of dotted 8th notes at D4.
I used the Modular V plugin from Arturia and tweaked this preset called JP Drum to make it a bit more tonal, and then started automating the filter cutoff, release time, and some other parameters to create a bit more interest to the otherwise very basic part.”
Chord Progression
“I started playing around on the keys with that percussive synth and landed on the chord progression that makes up the entirety of the remix. It’s a simple Em, Am, Bm7. The main keys sound is coming from the Wurli V2 plugin from Arturia, and I followed it with a subtle 8th note tremolo using Tremolator from Soundtoys.
I then layered the same MIDI part with a Max Instrument called Superberry from one of my favourite developers, Fors.FM. That sound helps give the keys a bit more attack, since the Wurlitzer alone didn’t really have that initial punch that I was after.”
Drums
“From there, I moved into creating the drum groove for the remix. I wanted to go fairly acoustic with my sound selection but still keep the punchiness that sampled drums bring. I brought in some samples from Aquarius Earth by Native Instruments and created the kick and snare pattern, and then layered that with in an instance of Abbey Road 70s Drummer by Native Instruments.
The Abbey Road kit is responsible for the more intricate groove parts such as the hi-hats, overheads and the fills. I tweaked the kit to remove all the room reverb as I wanted a super tight no-decay sound.
All the drum parts then feed into a bus where I have a bx_townhouse compressor from Brainworx, which is an SSL style buss compressor and my go-to for vintage drum processing. This is followed by SDRR2 from Klanghelm, one of the most underrated saturation plugins in the game.
Finally, I’ve got a reel-to-reel emulator called ReelBus by ToneBoosters, and by setting the tape speed to 15ips it gives the drums a tasty boost in the low mids which helps give the drums a bit more weight in the mix.
All of this then gets parallel processed by a 1176 emulation called MC77 from Purple Audio. I used the old school trick of pushing all the ratio buttons in, which absolutely decimated the dynamics of the drums, but when you mix a little bit in it adds so much energy to drums, especially towards the end of the remix you can hear the MC77 doing its magic on the overheads.”
Bass
“I played the bass part in on my Yamaha bass that I have at the studio. I didn’t have a particular part in mind but was just riffing off the groove I had established so far. For most of the song it’s just a muted staccato bass line, which culminates in held notes in the big final section.
The signal chain first goes into the Ampeg SVT-VR by Brainworx, which is my go-to bass amp. That runs into Radiator by SoundToys, which is 60’s preamp emulation and does wonders on bass. Then we go to the MJUC compressor by Klanghelm, which is just doing a tiny bit of compression (~2-3dB GR) to level out some of the peaks, and then finally the ReelBus from ToneBoosters to bring it into line tonally with the drums.”
Vocals
“The vocals for the most part are fairly uneffected. All I really added was a MicroShift from SoundToys to create a bit more stereo width to the lead vocal, and a ValhallaPlate from Valhalla DSP to give the vocals a bit more space. Otherwise there’s nothing on the vocal bus at all since the stems were already processed when I received them and sometimes knowing when to not use any effects is more important than knowing when to.
The ‘guitar solo’ at 2:50 is actually just Budjerah’s vocal transposed up an octave and then run through a guitar amp simulation; in this case TH-U by Overloud. This was definitely inspired by Runaway by Kanye West.”
Listen to Ready For The Sky below, see more on Taka Perry head over to his Instagram.