Still D.R.E. – Rocked Up

It started off a bit rough because we weren’t tuned to the same pitch. But my guitar wasn’t the problem! It turned out that Still D.R.E. isn’t tuned to the standard 440 Hz “A” pitch but to 428 Hz – assuming the song is in B♭ minor. (Although many tutorials claim it’s in A minor.)

The recording was originally made for a workplace surprise. Back then, I played along with the original track, but I got the urge to dive deeper and created my own version from the musical foundation. This brought its own set of challenges: for instance, I had to retune the synth plugins, my drum plugin didn’t sound anything like the original track’s drums, and I didn’t have any cello plugins. So, I never intended to replicate the original sound – but I did aim to capture a similar mood and character.

Honestly, I don’t listen to artists like Dr. Dre. I had already written off these kinds of tracks as machine-made, anti-music. But the process of recreating it turned out to be surprisingly educational! For example, I was sure the basic chords landed squarely on the eighth notes. However, when I entered them that way in the MIDI editor and compared them to the original, I realized I was wrong! There’s a slight rhythmic offset—a swing-like groove—in both the chords and the kick drum. Another surprise was that the chord progression wasn’t played in a conventional 8-4-4 division but in an 8-3-5 pattern.

Speaking of the kick drum: since I had recently watched a couple of tutorials on sidechain compression, I decided to try it in this project. I applied a kick-driven compressor to the guitar riff and keyboard chord tracks – and it worked!

The guitar tone I usually use didn’t really fit this musical context. But after a bit of EQ tweaking, everything fell into place and became nicely audible!

I did cheat a little on the solo. 😉 At this tempo and length, I couldn’t play the tapping section cleanly all the way through. So, I looped a shorter section that came out well. That was the plan anyway, since I think the original track also relies on machine-repeated motifs.

This same logic gave me the idea to chop up the beginning of the solo. From there, it was a natural step to slice up the corresponding video sections. In the end, I layered the video tracks on top of each other, creating a jagged, stop-motion effect – which made the simple, one-camera, in-room guitar video much more interesting!

Gear

• Guitar: Music Man Silhouette
• Guitar Tone: Headrush MX5 multi-effect, featuring Glorious (Morning Glory) overdrive pedal, Soldano SLO-100 amp, and Mesa Boogie IR
• Keyboards: Arturia Analog Lab plugin (Dance Piano preset) and numa Player plugin (She’s Lovely preset)
• Drums: SSD5.5 Free, with lots of EQ
• DAW/Video Editor: Reaper

Closing Words

If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out here: Dr. Dre – Still D.R.E., But it Rocks!