Having a good drum plugin is good to your mix, whether you’re sampling or playing a drum synth it will give you the blueprint to your tracks. We don’t all have the expediency of an in-house drummer and the control you get over the sound when you are using digital drums is unrivalled.
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10 Drum Software Instrument Plugins
We’ve composed ten of the greatest drum plugins that are available so you’re never at a loss in producing your beats.
1. Drumatic 3 by e-phonic
Drumatic 3 is an analog drum synth which provides a great deal of flexibility that is about 100% synthesised sounds. There are graphical envelopes for each element of the ‘kit’ and 6 stereo outputs transferable to any of the sounds. The video is also there but it doesn’t really explore Drumatic 3’s capabilities. It gives you an idea of the tools that are there.
2. MT Power Drum Kit
This kit has samples and sounds that are brilliant. All sounds in the kit have been created to give the best sound that is possible. You can adjust the density levels yourself for a better personal sound and choose from a Groove Library of thousands of rhythms for accompanying you. Check out this great plugin kit.
3. SM MegaReaper Drumkit
This is known as the “The deepest sampled drum kit in the world” and is the introduction to this incredible plugin. It has 127 velocity layers per kit piece and also has 2-4 samples for each note velocity. It’s sampled from the excellent 1960s Ludwig Oyster Blue Pearl Drum Kit and gives an unholy amount of great-sounding samples. Unfortunately, the kit only has the Reaper software but you can still install and use the almost 2 GB of drum samples.
4. Beatfactory Drums
This fat-sounding drum machine emulator can be sampled from the notorious MPC 2500 and is best for some heavy hip-hop beats. There is 10 kits built-in, an ADSR envelope to shape your sound and there is a built-in reverb that will make your drum tracks boom. There are 12 pads each with human being faders and it’s simple interface means that there is no-one who is left behind.
5. MiniSpillage
MiniSpillage is a capable quality drum synth that is able to high-res 64-bit DSP processing. It is having a bass drum, a flexible wood drum synthesising timbres to toms, and it also has a 6 oscillator hi-hat generator each that has a good level of customisable effects and filters.
6. EXD-80
This virtual analog drum and percussion synthesiser are able to produce a massive range of sound, from old school drum machines to the “crazy, mangled glitch sounds”. This plugin is best for loads of styles like the Dubstep, ambient, drum & bass, hip-hop and a lot more.
7. TS-808
What would a list of drum VSTs be without an 808 emulator inside. Tactile Sounds’ 808 is software that is emulated on the Roland TR-808 so you know it sounds great. There are 15 different drum sounds which have tune and decay knobs for most. Their creator claims that this version has more parameters and range than their ancestor.
8. Drum Pro by
Drum Pro has 20 drum kits, all of them can be expanded with extra sounds and kits from StudioLinked‘s website. It’s has a great electronic sound and the kits take samples from a number of classic drum machines. The customisation with effects and parameters is unluckily limited but you can also tweak many of parameters globally like the attack and decay.
9. TheDrumSource
This machine is being built by Ola Wistedt when a friend told him he missed being able to program drums like he could on a classic hardware drum machine. It features a 24 pattern sequencer, each pattern can be a 16/32/64/128 sequence and it supports a massive range of audio files for your samples. It genuinely works as well as a proper drum machine and has unlimited potential with its easily navigated sample browser.
10. MyDrumset by Bluenoise Plugins (Windows)
MyDrumset has kit recordings for recreating an acoustic kit in your computer. It looks great as the recordings are left untampered like the many plugins that you have the noise of a raw kit. You can also set it up so that each of the microphones sends separately to 12 different outputs and you can mix it like you were recording a real drum kit. There are 3 presets that are recorded on a Ludwig Fab Four kit.
That’s was the list of ten of the greatest drum plugins that are available for free. Hopefully, there is some ammo to fuel a load of new beats in the list above.