Best Free Drum VST Plugins 2020

in this video i'm going to reveal to you what i think of the best free drum vst plugins for 2020. [Music] hi folks i'm mike and i hope you're well now there's an awful lot of free drum plugins out there for you to choose from and an awful lot of them are awful so i've waded through them and i've chosen my top five free vst drum plugins for 2020 so that you can get straight to the good stuff download them and start using them in your music today so i'll be going through that in a moment but before we do get started if you do like this kind of content all about home recording daws gear reviews plugin reviews that kind of thing then please do subscribe and ring the bell on youtube so that you're notified about my future videos now as i say it's going to be my top five i'll start off with my least favorite and work towards my most favorite so let's get going with number five five so at number five we have an old favorite of mine the mt power drum kit 2 and one of the reasons i like this plug-in is because it delivers on the promise it makes in its title gives you a nice powerful sounding drum kit which particularly lends itself to styles such as rock now let's have a quick listen to each drum you get with the one drum kit you do get in this plugin [Music] so some pretty decent sounding acoustic samples i did find that when i was playing it out of the box when i first used it that it just felt like it wanted to be played really really hard no matter what i did on my keyboard it seemed like the drum hits came out pretty hard so i do find with this that if you want a little bit more subtlety it's a good idea to adjust the velocity settings on your keyboard or if you have that feature on your drum pads whatever input device you're using now i've got mine set to a fairly extreme setting now which ironically is the extra hard setting on my keyboard but that means i can play some pretty soft notes so i'll just play the kick drum from my keyboard here [Music] there's a nice variation in velocity there the same with the snare [Music] so you can use this a little bit more subtly than just hard hitting all the time but as i say you need to adjust the velocity curve on your input device now moving on we also have a mixer on this plug-in a nice simple to use mixer just faders here pan controls for each drum a really nice straightforward compressor you simply just switch it on and there's one knob to control the amount of compression you get one thing i do find very handy about this mixer is the fact that we do have a number of outputs we can direct our drums to in all you have eight outputs now this means for example if i was to send my snare to output number two that means it goes to a different channel in the console of my daw giving me control over that drum specifically i could eq it differently i could add different effects i could also automate it separately from the other drums i find that very very handy and also means you're not always going into the the plugin all the time when you're at the mixing stage i much prefer to stay in the console of my daw as much as possible during mixing phases of a project moving on from here we also have some grooves some nicely organized grooves and there's some good quality grooves amongst them as well so if we go to intros for example here there's an intro folder we've got a bunch to select from there i'll just randomly pick one hope it's a good one [Music] not bad at all so let's go some different beats here you get the idea nicely organized in these folders here you can also drag these out onto your daw as well so you're not just playing them from within the plugin itself you can drag them out you can edit them all that good stuff so let's just finish off by having a listen to this kit on a groove that i made just this morning four so really number four is the drums library which is played in the labs plug-in a free plug-in from spitfire audio now the labs plug-in gives you access to a number of free instruments all nice quality from spitfire audio and drums is just one of them now because it's not a dedicated plug-in to drums it does lack the features that you'd like to see in a drums plug-in but i've put it here because the quality of these samples is really nice and i think it could be easily used in a lot of contemporary forms of music because these are nice acoustic samples let's just have a listen to them now [Music] so everything you need for most songs there you know your symbols are your kick snare a few toms and some nice double hits on the toms up here for example as well nice double hitch on the snare so they're useful to have there and as you can see very very few controls you've got a master volume control here and you've also got this big dial here which is for reverb so i'm just going to play that little groove again there and i'm going to dial up the reverb so you can hear how that sounds it's not a bad sounding reverb at all now there is another control here which i haven't found any documentation for i feel like it may do some adjustment to the velocity and it definitely adds more presence and you can especially hear it in the symbols let me know in the comments down below what you think this is probably called maybe you've found the documentation which i haven't found now have a listen to what happens as i push this control up [Music] so that's the spitfire labs drum library three so unit number three is loop cloud drum and if you're into more electronic types of music this is definitely for you now the deal here is you sign up for loop cloud it's a free registration and that gives you access to some free loops as well as some paid stuff as well now as well as their main application you also get this drum plug-in and i think the reason for that is probably because they recognize that drums probably need a different interface to most other instruments so good on them for that now with the drum plug-in you also get a welcome pack which includes 10 different kits and a lot of them sound really really good you're going to hear them in a moment but first of all let's look at some of the features so you have your main drum pads over here and i've got the audio jack house drums loaded up we'll just have a quick listen to some of these [Music] some nice samples up here effects and a road sound there really really nice stuff it's very easy to be inspired by that now down here as you click on each drum you'll see controls for that particular drum so things like tuning envelope the drive filter there and you can also do some sends to the in-built effects which are delay and reverb right at the bottom you see the pattern control so there are some patterns which come with this and this is showing the pattern for the particular drum you've got selected so here i've obviously got kick selected and we can see the beats for pattern a there as they occur you can adjust the velocity just by dragging those bars up and down and you can also add some rolls in as well which is often used in these styles of music moving on we also have some mixer controls now this has pretty much the same controls you have for each individual drum but they're all together here in one place so you can kind of mix your kit together the one downside to this slightly if i'm going to have a little whinge about it is i would like to see some separate outputs for each drum perhaps they could do that in a future update i just like to work that way as i said earlier i like to mix from the main console of my daw but having said that this is free so should we complain no now let's move back to the pads here and let's have a listen to some of the different kits i'm just going to play this one first let's have a listen so that's the audio jack house drums let's move on to something a bit different the d and b drums and then to one of my absolute favorites i really really like this have a listen it sort of reminds me of the gorillas music which i really dig couple more so one thing i have to say about this collection is if you know this channel at all this is not really my genre of music at all but as soon as i was playing around with it it was really addictive i was really loving a lot of the sounds that you get with these kits and i was very inspired to start using these sounds within my own music so let's see if that happens in the future but can't recommend this one enough that's loop cloud drum so what do you think about my choices so far don't forget if there's a plugin which you really love which you think should be on the list let me know in the comments down below i'd love to hear from you and if you are enjoying this video so far don't forget to hit the like button that really helps me out a lot now let's get back to number two two so in number two we have drum mica a free contact library which thankfully plays in the free version of contact that being the contact player and i'll put a link for that down in the description now this plug-in's a little bit different and it's quirky and i like that about it because rather than come from the perspective of changing the sound by giving you lots of different drums this is about changing the microphones you use on those drums and it's no surprise because this library is coming from sennheiser and neumann microphone giants so this is more of what i think of as a producer's drum kit you get a basic drum kit but then you mould it by changing the microphones and then using the different effects built in or you can use the effects in your daw which i'll get to a little bit later but first of all let's just have a quick listen to the basic drum sounds so as i say some fairly basic but very useful acoustic sounds there so how do we go about molding it well for example if we click if we go over here and click on this microphone here we can change that out for the snare so we've got a couple of choices suitable for snares there a sennheiser microphone there and also a neumann microphone there and they're going to change the sound of the snare let's have a listen so that's a really nice way of molding the sound of the kit as you want it now you have further control here when you go to sections like the mixer so let's go to the mixer here there's quite a number of controls here your general mixer controls what i really like in here um apart from the eq and the compressor which you get with is the transient design i always love to use transient designers on my drum they're a really quick way of getting like a more punchy sound if you want that or a more gentle sound if you want that so some nice features there you also do get some beats with this as well a nice selection if we go to the beats section let's go to the hip hop section here for example i'm randomly choosing things here folks so i don't know if this will be good or not let's have a listen hmm nice let's go to some funk [Music] now if you want to get even more control you can actually have these drums go out to separate channels on your mixer it's not that straightforward but it can be done so if we go over to options here you can see at the bottom here that we can choose different outputs for each drum now it's important to note that of these eight outputs these are not exactly outputs to your console but they go to different outputs from within the contact plugin and then you're going to have to route those out to the console in your daw a little bit convoluted but it can be done and that's going to give you even more control over individual drums and their mix so this is drum mica definitely give it a go if you like really tasty sounding acoustic drums so it wouldn't be a top five for me without some honorable mentions these are a couple of plugins which didn't quite make the top five but they were very close the reason i didn't pick them is probably because they're not that useful to many people but they may be just perfect for you so first up i've got drum pro i've had this in a top five before it got beaten by some others this time but it's still a great plug-in especially if you're into electronic music now at the moment we have the 909 loaded up so let's have a listen to the kicks and snares and stuff from that some hi-hats and some claps or if you like your even more classic 808 let's load that one up [Music] so some nice electronic cells there there's a bunch of kits if you're into electronic music so definitely check out drum pro now next up we have one of the weirdest plugins ever this is line of legends it's so quirky i kind of like it now i think this is geared more towards electronic music but it has got some really nice acoustic sounds in there as well so let's have a listen to the kick for example definitely electronic yeah and some snare sounds nice variation there you've got your claps and uh some very acoustic sounding toms and also your hi-hat ride and some crashes so a quirky kit but there may just be the sound that you want amongst it it's free you can download it and have fun with it right away one so in the number one i have steven slate drums five the free edition where you get one free drum kit and the reason i've picked this for my number one spot is because of its all-round nature it ticks a lot of boxes that the other ones did but all here in one package now to begin with we have a nice sounding acoustic kit let's just have a quick listen to each drum so that can be used for a lot of different types of music from pop to rock jazz blues all that kind of stuff so that can be a very very useful kit in itself now as you see me click on each drum you'll see that there's individual controls for each drum so that we can mold the sound now i particularly like the fact that we've got some adsr controls so attack decay sustain release that can really change the sound of a drum and make it more suitable for your song and i like the fact that we've got individual control for velocity on each drum as well so we've got different velocity curves for each drum rather than treating the kit as a whole now over in the mixer section apart from the obvious controls of faders and panning and muting and soloing and all that kind of good stuff we also do have the ability to output to individual channels in our daw very handy indeed as i've mentioned before i know i go on about it but it's a really important feature to me so i'm happy to see that they've included it here um and then next we move on to the mapping features we can assign different keys to different drums very handy if you're used to coming from a different plugin you want compatibility or you've received some midi files and you just want to be able to set them up via the keys rather than go in and change the midi so i like that now of course we also have a groove section this is not so great for me it's nice that they've given us a good selection of grooves to choose from here i just think the quality of them is not that awesome that's a matter of opinion of course let's just pick one at random as we have before and play that well as it happens i quite like that but i did find some of the others a little bit ordinary now this uh can be grabbed and then dragged off to your daw so then you can just drop it um on a lane in your mid as midi in your daw and adjust that yourself and make it your own all good stuff and that's why this is my number one pick for drum plugins for 2020. so i've got a question for you if you had to choose just one of these plugins you couldn't have any other which one would it be let me know in the comments down below and while you're there don't forget to like this video that really helps me out because it lets youtube know that other people should watch this video as well if you didn't like this video you don't like free stuff then do hit the dislike button twice for me and if you do like this kind of content make sure you subscribe and ring the bell on youtube so that you're notified about my future videos now by the way if you're interested in any of the gear that you see me use in these videos don't forget to check in the description down below for my gear guide and i will see you all in the next video hmm

Channel: Creative Sauce

Views: 132,266

Rating: 4.9374576 out of 5

Keywords: Best Free Drum VST Plugins 2020, Best Free Drum VST Plugins, drum vst plugins, vst plugins, vst plugins free, drum vst plugins free, best drum vst, best drum vst free, free vst plugins, free vst, best free vst, free plugins, best free plugins, drum vst, drum plugin, best drum plugins, vst plugin, vst drums, mt power drumkit 2, free plugins 2020, free vst 2020, best vst 2020, free vst instruments 2020, best free vsts 2020, free vsts 2020, free, 2020, plugins, drums, beats

Id: -ED3VJuYCVY

Length: 18min 24sec (1104 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/pangkero]

I am always watching creative sauce on youtube. Thank you for the tutorials especially on how to use cakewalk.

[u/CreativeSauce2B]

Hi folks! There are a lot of free drum plugins, but only a few good ones. I've done the hard work for you and made a top 5. Do you agree with my picks?