Programming Drums for My Cover of Dexter and The Moonrocks – Why Don't You Say So

Out of all the things I do when creating an instrumental cover of a song, programming the drums is generally the most time intensive for me. This video is quite long and I'd say 99% of people won't be interested in it at all. However, if you want to make your own covers and don't have a drum set but do have a computer, you may be curious how others are pulling it off.

In this video I walk step by step through how I program the drums for my instrumental cover of "Why Don't You Say So" by Dexter and The Moonrocks, using the tools in my DAW (digital audio workstation) to build a professional-sounding drum track.

Initial Setup

I start every instrumental cover by getting a WAV file of the song that I'm wanting to cover. After dragging the WAV file into Fender Studio Pro I'll extract the tempo to a tempo track. Most of the time the extraction is fairly accurate. The purpose of this step is so that when I start adding the MIDI notes by hand they line up to the grid. With this particular cover it took some time getting the snare in the audio track to line up on the 2 and the 4.

Once I've got the track lined up the way I want it, I'll use the Separate Stems function in Studio Pro to get the vocals, drums, bass and guitars to their own separate tracks. This isn't really necessary but makes learning the parts a little easier. I would recommend using the feature if it's available to you.

Programming Each Drum Part

When I start programming drums I generally solo out the original drum audio and extract the drums to MIDI using the Studio Pro feature. When this feature first became an option, I thought it was neat but I don't think there's been a single time it's been right. It does give a fairly good start at getting a majority of the snare hits and kick hits right. I'll then drag in my favorite sounding drum plugin, ML Drums, and load my custom preset. Next, I'll drag the extracted MIDI drums onto the ML Drums track. I usually only have a little time at the end of the night to work on music so programming the drums usually takes me between 3 and 5 days.

Snare

I always program drums in the same order, starting with the snare. I'll listen to the original drum stem with everything else muted, including the ML Drums track. I'll listen to the song from start to finish many times and add or remove snare notes as needed, taking special care to listen for any ghost notes or flams.

Kick

After the snare programming is finished I'll move on to the kick. The process is the same: I'll listen to the song from start to finish, adding or removing kick MIDI notes as needed. In my experience, the kick and snare are probably the easiest parts to program.

Hi-Hats

I then move on to working on the hi-hats. As I go through the song I try to adjust the velocity to sound as natural as I possibly can and pay attention to the foot pressure on the hat. For some reason this song was a little easier to program than most.

Cymbals and Toms

Cymbal programming is fairly straightforward. I tend to concentrate on the pitch of the crash rather than where the crash appears on the kit. Tom programming can be troublesome sometimes. You have to pay attention to the separation between what are toms and what is a kick because sometimes it's not immediately obvious.