Best Free Drum Plugins For Electronic Drums

[Music] [Music] hey welcome back to 65 drums my name is justin so today we're going to be taking a look at some of the best drum plugins you can download for use with an electronic drum set i know a lot of people make videos on this topic based on the perspective of like a guitar player or a keyboard player who wants to create drum grooves on a midi grid and stuff but this is going to be more on the perspective of an electronic drummer who wants to be able to get sounds from their laptop i'm going to start off with my least favorite drum plugin play an example show you around the interface talk about the pros and cons and then move up to my favorite option we're going to go through four different drum plug-ins today including ones you have heard of and some maybe you haven't heard of all right so let's start off with number four which is jam sticks for free edition [Music] okay so you got a little taste of what this thing sounds like and to be honest this is my least favorite drum plugin sound on the entire list it just does not sound great one thing it does have going for it though is the fact that it has more kits than any of the other ones on this list so you do have a lot of options but jam sticks just overall the quality of the sound is just not there and that's one of the reasons why i would be hesitant to recommend anyone downloading this the software has got an interesting trick up its sleeve i believe you can play this in vr because when i was doing the install it asked if i had a vr headset and i said no so uh but yeah it's kind of interesting i've never heard of any other drum plugin at least on the free side that has that option so when you load up this plugin you're going to go to kits you're going to see nothing there but a drumstick over here you have to press load and then go through the options that you have there are some that are grayed out or reddit outs because you are not allowed to use them but you can click on a kit and then it will load it up something you need to know i think this program is a little bit heavier than the other ones on the list and i've had some issues where i would have had to increase the buffer size in order to get rid of some clicking sounds actually had to restart reaper once because i was having this issue right here i think it's kind of because of this big 3d model you like the symbol sway and stuff as you hit them in order to actually use this with your electronic drum set you have to go over here to options and then you have to midi play and jam you have to make sure that is enabled i do like the the fact that there's a velocity mapping thing that you can like draw with over here or use linear compress expanded but overall because of how poor the sounds are i can't really recommend this to most people okay so now let's move ahead to drum plugin number three which is an og mt power kit 2. [Music] so [Music] all right so that's what the only kit in the software sounds like and to be honest i do like it a little bit more than the first option but the snare drum i it doesn't really connect with me and the kind of drumming that i do and also the ghost notes are still pretty freaking loud even if you turn down the compressor setting but here's a look through the interface you have the avatar or the drum set that you can click around on if you go over here to mixer you have compression options you got volume options and panning and of course you got your outputs you can send these to individual tracks and further process them inside of your daw by the way just so you know i am using reaper i'll give you a couple of tips on using reaper with these free drum plug-ins at the end of the video let's move over here to settings and this is where you can map your drums for e-drums there's a whole e-drum section which i greatly appreciate you can press load and then you can go through the presets that people have already done for you so i just told it i had a roland td 17 i think even though i have a td 30 roll on midi mapping is pretty much identical so i click that and it was mostly set up correctly for my drum set all i had to do was tweak a couple of things all the toms were slightly off so what i had to do was i pressed hi tom and then midi learn and then what i did was i hit my high tom and then it automatically mapped it to the correct number and then over here you have the hi-hat pedal adjustment that you can do to really dial that in as well so while this is definitely not my favorite drum plug-in on the list it is a free option you can download and just have an extra kit if you feel like messing around with it big props to the developers for making this and not charging anything all right so let's move ahead to number two which is perfect drums [Music] all right so that was perfect drums here's what you have to do in order to download this it's a little bit of a pain in the butt i'm not going to lie but it is cool to have especially if you want to bring in your own multi-layered samples into your laptop and you need a program in order to trigger them this will do that for you which is why i'm glad that i have it now so this is the website perfectdrums.com as you'd probably assume you're going to be downloading the perfect drums player right here and it doesn't come with any sounds you have to go also download the demo kit right here so once you do all that and you open up your daw and then you open up the drum plugin here's what it looks like you have access to the sampler menu the mixer menu and not the drum menu so this is what you would normally use if you actually bought the program but what we have here is the sampler menu in order to actually start using this because like i said there are no sounds you download the free kits go over here to kit designer and then load sampler kit and then point to the i think it's the pdk right here yeah this right here you you highlight that and you open it up now when you first start playing around with this the midi notes might be slightly off for your drum set brand so you have to manually adjust these things sometimes in order to do that let's say we want to make sure the snare sound isn't playing the ride cymbal sound you go over here select the snare drum now it turns green now over here on the center click learn and then hit your snare drum head zone and then it will change the midi note to the correct note that's all you got to do over here you have direct overhead mics room mics reverb that's nice to have over here on the crash cymbals you don't have quite as many options sometimes it just depends on the instrument if you want to see the different sound options for all the different drums and symbols at once obviously you go over here to mixer and you can see everything at once this program is made by naughty seal you've heard of naughty dog this is naughty seal and then inside a sampler you have all these different articulation options you have access to right here so all this being said who should download this i feel like this is good for people that want to be able to bring in their own sounds and also for people that want to use this to layer with other drum plugins at once because you could have this going at the exact same time that you have empty power kit going or the first pick on our list so i like it as a layering option and as a tool to bring in my own sounds but i wouldn't use this stand alone because there is no rim shot zone there is no edge zone of the ride cymbal the hi-hat is kind of a mess there's a little things here and there that make this not a fully flushed out drum plug-in for electronic drummers but it's great as a layering tool in my opinion i want to use the strengths of this plugin but not the weaknesses so i'm using the snare kick and tom sounds but i'm not using the hi-hat sounds for example i'll use another drum plug-in at the same time layer them both together and turn off different instruments in each one until i find a mix that works out well for me we've gone through a lot of plugins that are good at one thing and bad at another thing there's always some sort of compromise going on so now let's move ahead to my favorite pick out of the whole list which doesn't really do bad at any sort of category it's just basically good at everything and that's steven slate drums 5 free edition [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] if you keep watching for a few more minutes i'm going to be playing some audio of steven slate drums 5 and perfect drums together at the same time because i really like combining those two plugins and you'll see why in a second but let's take a look at the interface so steve slate jones 5 literally has everything locked down most anything you want to do inside of a drum plug-in it can do it so for example you can tune all the drums you have volume adjustments over all the drums you have multiple microphones for some of these drums like kick drum in kick drum out if we select the snare drum we have all these different mic options right here plus room mics and overhead mics it's all great to see and if you're having phase issues you can adjust the phase right here and they get really granular with every specific zone so we have the center of the snare the rim shot volume we've got the snare side volume the side stick volume all that stuff you don't see that in the other plugins you also have some dynamic controls over here which is cool to see under the mixer option we have volume for all these different things under the map i went over here to load presets and then i selected the roland td-30 and i was good to go you might have to go do some other things you might have to individually change a midi note here and there but i sure didn't have any issues myself i think this is a great combination of all the strengths of the previous plugins so now let's see what this sounds like if you use it with perfect drums at the same time [Music] now are any of these free drum plugins as good as superior drummer 3 or some of the other paid options out there absolutely not but this video is about what you can get done with free options and i think that there are some good choices for you to go through and download and see what you like alright so now that we've covered a bunch of free drum plugins i need to talk about one final thing the daw if you're new to drum software just so you know except in rare cases you can't open them like an app they can't be opened standalone they have to be opened within a daw so you're also going to go have to download a daw if you don't already have one already so here's one that i would highly recommend it's called reaper the reason why i recommend it is that i've used it for years and it works perfectly fine and there's an unlimited free trial you could literally use it for free for years until you decide that you do like it a lot and then you can spend like the 70 bucks or whatever to help out the developers alright so step one is go to roland.com alesis.com yamaha.com whatever the maker of your drum set is and go download the drivers for the drum set that you want to use with your laptop so for me i went to roland.com searched up the roland td-30 drivers and downloaded and installed them once you do that you're going to want to plug in your drum set to the laptop most modern drum sets it's all just a usb connection so just get the appropriate cable if you have an older drum set that just has a midi out port you'll have to buy midi out to usb but most people watching won't have that issue your daw looks for new midi devices when it first boots up and after you boot up it stops looking for them so if you wait until after opening it up to plug into your laptop it won't even see your drum set because it finished looking for new midi devices so plug it in next you'll want to open up your daw so starting off you'll go over here on mac click on this go over to audio device settings once you're in here you'll want to choose your output now on my role in td 30 it accepts audio input over usb so my audio device will be my role in td 30. for most people though it'll probably be the headphone jack on their laptop that's where you'll plug in your headphones to hear this stuff so you'll probably press built and output for the buffer size i select 64 and then i click apply the lower the number the less latency that you'll hear between you hitting the drum and hearing it coming out of your headphones but if you go too low and if your computer can't handle a really low number then you'll hear all kinds of glitches and clicking so if that happens you'll have to raise it up to like 124 or whatever but 64 works well for this 2012 macbook so that's what i've set it at so the next thing you're going to want to do is go over here to midi devices and then find your your drum set because you've plugged it in before so it should be able to recognize it and you'll click on it and then you'll make sure that it is enabled you click apply and we're done with this little window the next step is to create a new track so go over to this empty space you double click you arm it by clicking on this little red button and make sure this isn't muted because that can cause problems if this red thing is not enabled you won't be able to hear the plugin next we're going to want to tell it to receive midi signals from the roland td 30. so we click on inputs go over here to midi click on roland and then all channels now we need to tell it which drum plugin we want to use so i go over here to fx and then it's going to be under vsti and then you'll just see all your different drum plugins that you've got i'm going to open up steven slate press ok and there it is now if it can't find any drum plugins you're going to have to go into the settings of reaper and tell it where you've downloaded the plugins let me know if there are any other free drum plugins you'd like me to cover in an episode 2 of this series because it would be kind of interesting to try out a bunch of other free drum plugins and see if there's anything better than steven slate drums 5. have an awesome day and i'll see you all in a few

Channel: 65 Drums

Views: 68,530

Keywords: Best free drum plugin, free drum software, free drum vst, free drum vst software, drum plugins for edrums, electronic drum software, electronic drum plugin, electronic drum vst

Id: JyuU_XxIm2I

Length: 15min 9sec (909 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 11 2021