The Best Drum VST Plugins for Acoustic and Electronic Drums

The best drum VST depends on the style you make: for realistic acoustic drums, Toontrack Superior Drummer, EZdrummer and XLN Audio Addictive Drums are the long-standing choices, while electronic producers are better served by a drum sampler like Native Instruments Battery or a drum machine VST that recreates the 808 and 909. Most producers end up with one of each.

Drum plugins fall into four groups: acoustic drum libraries, drum samplers, drum machine emulations and drum synths. Each solves a different problem, so it's worth knowing which group you need before comparing products.

Best drum VSTs at a glance

Best drum VST for acoustic drums

Acoustic drum libraries are recordings of real kits, sampled hit by hit at many velocities, with separate microphones you can mix like a real session. They're what you want for rock, pop, singer-songwriter and anything that should sound played by a person.

Toontrack Superior Drummer is the deep end: big multi-mic libraries, full mixing inside the plugin and plenty of expansion kits. EZdrummer is its simpler sibling, built around songwriting, with grooves you drag into your song and tools for building a full drum part quickly. XLN Audio Addictive Drums sits in between, with kits that sound mixed out of the box. Steven Slate Drums is popular with rock and metal producers for its punchy, upfront samples.

All of these respond best to well-programmed MIDI. Vary velocities, avoid every hit landing exactly on the grid, and use the included groove libraries as a starting point. A real drummer rarely hits the snare at the same strength twice, and the libraries reward you for programming that way: they switch between different recorded hits as the velocity changes, so the kit sounds alive instead of machine-gunned.

Drum VSTs for metal

Metal asks for drums that stay tight at fast tempos: consistent kicks for double-bass runs and a snare that cuts through dense guitars. Steven Slate Drums and GetGood Drums are popular metal choices, and Toontrack sells metal expansion kits for Superior Drummer and EZdrummer. For a free metal drum VST, start with the free edition of Steven Slate Drums or MT Power Drum Kit 2, then add EQ and a transient shaper for more kick attack: Snap's Kick Click Forward preset does that job.

Best drum machine VST for electronic beats

Hip-hop, trap, house and techno were built on drum machines, above all the Roland TR-808 and TR-909. Software versions let you use those sounds with full control over tuning, decay and tone.

D16 Group's Nepheton (808-style) and Drumazon (909-style) are well-regarded emulations with step sequencers modeled on the originals. Roland Cloud offers Roland's own software TR-808 and TR-909. If you want to build kits from samples instead, Native Instruments Battery is a dedicated drum sampler with a grid of cells, deep per-sound editing and a large included library.

For '80s pop and funk, the sound many producers want is the LinnDrum, one of the first drum machines built on digital samples of real drums. A Linn drum VST is usually a sample set of those sounds played from a drum sampler. Synthesized machines like Thump cover the 808 and 909 side of electronic drums instead.

Drum programming: piano roll or a drum sequencer VST

How you program matters as much as the sounds. A piano roll works with every drum plugin and gives you full control over velocity and timing. A drum sequencer VST adds its own step grid, as Nepheton and Drumazon do, which suits classic 16-step drum machine programming. Thump plays from MIDI in your DAW, and its Swing and Humanize controls give a programmed groove a human pocket.

Thump (ours): a drum synth with a gliding 808

Thump takes a different route: every sound is synthesized in real time, with no samples at all. That means the kick, snare, tom and 808 tune in Hz or semitones to sit in your song's key, and you can stretch the 808 tail or shorten the hats with one knob instead of hunting for a new sample.

There's a synthesized kick, snare, clap, hats and tom, plus a monophonic 808 with glide and drive that you can play chromatically for 808 melodies. A Glue bus compressor and a Crush bit crusher finish the kit. Kits cover Trap Kit, Boom Bap, House Classic, Techno Warehouse, Lo-fi Dusty, Drill Slide, Electro Funk and Minimal Click. Thump costs €39 and runs as VST3, AU and AAX.

The Boom Bap kit below uses a 58 Hz kick with drive, a 180 Hz snare, more Glue than the trap kits and Crush at 35% for sampler grit. Program a beat on the step sequencer.

Thump won't give you a realistic acoustic kit; that's what the libraries above are for. It's built for electronic genres where tuning and shaping each drum matters more than realism.

Best free drum plugins

• MT Power Drum Kit: a free acoustic drum plugin with a usable rock and pop kit and a groove library.
• Ableton Drum Rack: load a sample on each pad and add effects per sound. Included in every edition of Live.
• FL Studio FPC: a pad-based drum sampler with kits, included with FL Studio.
• Logic Pro Drum Machine Designer and Drummer: electronic kits and a virtual drummer that plays acoustic grooves for you.

For more free tools, including our own, see the free plugins page.

How to choose drum plugins

• Match the genre. Acoustic libraries for band music; drum machines, samplers and drum synths for electronic and hip-hop.
• Think about workflow. If you program in a piano roll, any of these work. If you like step sequencing, look for a plugin with one built in.
• Check disk space. Acoustic libraries can be large downloads. Drum synths and machine emulations are small.
• Plan your processing. Drums rarely sound finished straight out of the plugin. You'll still EQ, compress and often clip them.

On that last point, our guide on how to EQ drums covers the kick and snare frequencies that matter, and Heat's Drum Clipper preset shaves the peaks off a drum bus so it hits harder at the same level. For making the bass duck under the kick, see how to sidechain.