Recreating a Drum track with MIDI

So in my last post I mentioned that I am trying to recreate the Shinedown song Devil as closely as possible. I'm used to using drag and drop MIDI files to write songs to. But for this song I had to recreate the drums from the song. The drums in Devil have a swing to them so programing to a grid was out.

The first thing I did was to find a drum sheet on Songsterr

I found a similar sound in Addictive drums and synced Reapers virtual keyboard

Then I spent a couple of evenings practicing just the kick and snare to the clip on Songsterr

I recorded them live to that and then realized I should have been playing along to the actual song...
ok live and learn.... doh

What Happened Was...
I imported the original song into a file in Reaper along side the MIDI track and found I was rushing the entire song. I think between rushing and Songsterr not being entirely accurate it was kind of a mess.

So THEN

I expanded the original song and manually moved the drum hits to where the transients are in the song. This was the hardest part of the whole thing because the chorus is really loud and it's hard to see exactly where the hits are.

Next I added tom fills and cymbals. I watched a couple of people doing drum covers on youtube to help know exactly what was going on.

WHEW! If that sounds like a lot of work it was. But I think I learned a lot from my mistakes. I think next time I'll start with playing along with the song and that should help a lot.

Next up is our favorite part. The GUITARS!!