• Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

Johnny Copland

  • Lessons
  • Services
  • Music
  • Blog
  • Newsletter
  • About
  • Contact

Feb 03 2023

Summer Walker Remix

One of my favourite Summer Walker tunes is Karma, from her 2018 album Last Days Of Summer. Here’s my remix.

The original is super dark, so I wanted to try giving it a more uptempo funk feel in contrast with the dark vibe of the lyrics and the original beat. I hope you enjoy it and if you scroll down you’ll see a shorter video breakdown of some of the parts.

Summer Walker Remix Mini Breakdown

Here’s a short breakdown video I did showing some of the parts that went into this Summer Walker remix. Stay tuned if you enjoyed this, because I’m going to do a longer one at some point where I explain what’s going on in a bit more depth.

Quick Background

I started by getting the Acapella off YouTube. Once I had the tempo and key down, I imported the vocal into Ableton. I then spent the biggest amount of time playing around and coming up with a chord progression for the main Chorus and Verse.

When I’m coming up with ideas for parts I usually try not to look at the keyboard or guitar but shut my eyes. I find that helps you better get lost in the emotion of the song rather than thinking too analytically. Here I was trying to imagine someone in their car singing along with the acapella, driving down the coast near where I live! I don’t know if it helped but here are the chords I came up with:

Emaj7 – Emâ–³7 – F#/B – Eb7aug

I had to be careful with the Eminor and make sure it didn’t clash with any of the G# in her vocals.

With that in place I then layered in some funk guitars doing a muted part and came up with the bass part in the video above.

After that I added some drums and high guitar held notes in the chorus to beef things up.

For the breakdown I filtered the drums and used lots of FX samples and riser sweeps to try and put it into a different sonic space.

Let me know if you enjoyed it and if you have any questions in the comments below.

Related

Written by Johnny Copland · Categorized: Music Production, Remixes

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Footer

Follow me on

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • TikTok
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

© 2023 Johnny Copland. All Rights Reserved.