9 Best Drum VST Plugins: Options For Every Genre of Music

Searching for the best drum VST plugins can feel like trying to find the "best pair of shoes". Do you want slippers, running shoes, boots, or high heels? Are you looking for an electronic kit or realistic drum sounds? Do you need a sequencer that chops up loops from your drum library to create new variations?

The point is, you've got to narrow down your search in order to find what you're looking for. Our in-house team of music producers have years of experience with drum software. We receive ongoing requests from users about which drums to use with our AI singing voice presets, so we decided to put in the work and map things out for you all.

n this article you'll get a walkthrough of the best drum VSTs for each use case. We've also done our best to summarize the top-level categories for this niche, to help you figure out which ones make the most sense for you.

This is not a sponsored article and there are no affiliate links to third-party companies.

Kits with realistic drum sounds: Addictive Drums 2

Price: $169 - $499 one time purchase

Addictive Drums 2 is a virtual instrument by XLN Audio that centers around high-quality drum kits. It comes with 130 production-ready presets that can be customized with a multi-channel mixer and built-in effects like EQ, compression, and saturation. You can blend and adjust mic settings like "overhead" and "room" to capture different kinds of ambience.

The plugin is based on drag-and-drop workflows with instant drum replacement and over 5000 MIDI grooves. Kits can be built from scratch or selected from their core library of presets.

You'll find that XLN went way beyond traditional sampling and drum sequencing with this software. We're big fans of the beat transformer feature, which uses accents and randomization macros to modify your performance without any changes to MIDI drum tracks in the piano roll. Huge time saver!

You can try the plugin for free, after which there are three pricing tiers. With each tier you get more drum kits and MIDI beat packs.

Best affordable cinematic drums: Stormdrum 3

Price: $9.99/mo subscription

Stormdrum 3 by EastWest is a cinematic percussion library featuring acoustic drums from around the world. You'll find concert drums, taikos, gongs, found-metal pieces, shakers, wooden frogs and many other exotic sounds.

Samples were recorded with multi-microphone setups by master percussionists and world class instruments from private collections. It includes five microphone positions for multi-dimensional mixing up to 11.1 surround sound. A large MIDI groove library is also included, with tools like "tap-to-find" to match rhythms.

SD3 runs inside EastWest's Opus engine, where you'll find flexible mixer routing with up to six stereo outputs. It has built-in effects like SSL EQ, dynamics, transient shaping, and reverb.

Please be aware that it has has somewhat demanding system requirements. You'll need at least 16 GB RAM and the library's size can range from 86 GB to more than 236 GB depending on what you install.

EastWest offers a 14 day free trial, after which they charge a monthly subscription fee.

Best lofi hip hop drums: LunchTable

Price: €39 one time purchase

Now for something completely different. LunchTable by BeatSurfing is one of the best tools for creating tasty lofi beats with that special boom bap flavor. It lives somewhere between acoustic and electronic drums, emulating sounds like pen taps, pencil taps, coin drops, and hand slaps on tabletops.

This plugin may have a cool lowbrow design, but it's packed with some really high quality drum sounds, including over 100 multilayered, velocity-sensitive samples recorded using both close and room microphones.

Lunchtable has a built-in mixer, including convolution reverb and a parametric EQ for shaping tonal qualities. Experiment with their 116 preset MIDI grooves and a 12-pad one-shot trigger interface for manual performance. You can of course program your own too.

The file size is only 335MB, which is incredibly lightweight compared to pro audio libraries like StormDrum3. BeatSurfing offers a 10-day free trial for those who want to test it first.

Best Marching Drums VST: Drumline by Spitfire

Price: $29 one time purchase

Drumline is a free virtual instrument available through Spitfire Audio’s LABS platform. It's focused primarily on marching band sounds. You may be able to find similar samples in an orchestral kit but the cost, size and quantity will be higher. Drumline can help narrow the scope a bit to keep you focused and get the samples you need faster.

The VST has nine marching percussion patches with tight snares, tenors and bass drums, cymbals, and full ensemble arrangements performed by the Blue Devils drum corps.

Pick this one up if you need dry recordings with more precise rhythmic articulation. You'll need to download the free LABS software in order to load Drumline, so be sure to install that first.

Metallic percussion sounds: RANDOM Metal

Price: $59 one time purchase

RANDOM Metal is another drum and percussion synthesizer plugin by BeatSurfing. The interface became popular among music producers for its vibrant liquid-metal animations, but don't let the visuals fool you. The beauty of this plugin goes more than skin deep.

As the name suggests, the VST excels with metallic and percussive textures, offering more than 40 percussive types to choose from and hundreds of dynamic parameters to tweak. The interface provides 12 trigger pads with parameter controls for instability, impact, decay, pitch, effects color, and stereo width.

Installation requires minimal space, between 246-330MB depending on whether you're a Windows or MacOS user. Users can also import external samples into the system, which will of course grow to the space consumed by the plugin's stored audio library.

Best Drum VSTs for accompaniment: EZdrummer 3

Price: $99 one time purchase

EZdrummer 3 by Toontrack is like a virtual bandmate who listens to your music and comes up with rhythms that compliment your project specifically. Forget about programming a drum machine or tweaking parameters to randomize your way to a drum part. This plugin does it all for you.

The library covers seven full drum kits and six cymbal sets, alongside 2500+ MIDI grooves and fills. The user interface is scalable and features a song-building track, a grid editor, and AI-based groove suggestion tools like "Bandmate" and "Tap2Find."

Packed with 15 GB of drum and cymbal samples recorded through multiple microphone setups, you'll can build custom drum kits to match the timbre of your recording. The mixer supports multichannel output and includes built-in effects to further refine the sound.

You'll need at least 4 GB RAM and about 36 GB of disk space, but 18GB of that will disappear after you complete the installation. Toontrack sells expansion packs called EZXs, in case you want to buy new kits for specific music genres you're writing for. You'll find an electronic kit or two in that collection, but most of them are realistic drum sounds.

Studio grade drum kit VST: Superior Drummer 3

Price: $239

Toontrack's Superior Drummer 3 is a bit upmarket from EZDrummer, with a massive 230 GB sample library recorded in 11.1 surround sound at Galaxy Studios using 22 microphones. If you're looking for an electronic kit, this is the collection to choose with over 350 drum machine sounds to choose from.

The library includes kits, snares, kicks, cymbals, and ambient sounds for advanced studio production. The mixer offers up to 45 channels, bleed control, and effects racks per bus. It also supports tempo-synced MIDI editing, multi-take recording, stacking multiple drum layers, and importing external samples.

Alongside the technical stuff, Superior Drummer 3 is more accessible visually. You can customize your mixer layout and get better macro controls. It has custom graphics for all the drums. You'll get tons of new sounds not available in EZDrummer. Really, one of the only key features it's missing is the AI bandmate and accompaniment.

You'll need 4 GB RAM (though 8+ GB is recommended) and 291GB of space during the download and installation phase. 55GB of space will be freed up after installing.

Sequenced AI drum grooves: Steven Slate Drums

Price: $9.99/mo subscription

Steven Slate Drums 5.5 offers large collection of drum samples including 148 kit presets with a huge range of virtual drum instruments (135 snares, 112 kicks, 58 toms, and a couple dozen cymbals and hi-hats).

We've already covered other plugins offering high quality drum kits, but this one supports advanced MIDI mapping and a feature called Groove AI. Basically, you can tap along with a track and have Steven Slate Drums transform the idea into a full percussion section.

To be honest, the sequencer and music adaptation is more simplistic than EZDrummer, but you get what you pay for. It's hard to argue with a $9.99/mo subscription compared to Toontrack's $99 price point.

Rock Drum Kit sounds: Modern & Massive 2

Price: $179 one time purchase

Modern & Massive 2 by GetGood Drums is a standalone drum instrument that comes with 1500+ built in grooves. It uses proprietary Fluid sampling technology to model realistic drum performance with layered dynamics and articulations. The plugin includes several drum kits recorded in detail, a full-featured mixer with effects like EQ and compression, and over 100 mix-ready presets.

This plugin is great if you're trying to emulate realistic rock and metal drumming. You can find similar sounds from other plugins but the grooves are what set GetGood Drums apart.

Isolate one-shots from drum samples with Controlla

All of the drum vst plugins we’ve mentioned have centered around other company’s sound libraries. However, you may be sitting on samples and drums breaks of your own that you want to repurpose. If that’s the case, we’ve got something to show you.

Controlla has an AI drum stem separator that targets individual drum hits in a track, so you can upload a wav, mp3 or m4a and separate away the non-percussive instruments. On top of that, you can separate the drum track into separate kick, snare, cymbals and tom stems.

Visit Controlla Voice and sign up to access the stem splitter.

Here's how it works:

1. Click the "Split Stems" option on the top menu

2. Hit the "Select stems" button to choose which drum stems you want

3. Drag a music file onto the page and hit "split stems"

   
   

Voila! It's that simple. Now you can save any of those instruments to your hard drive and sample them in your drum VSTs. Use the plugin's parameters to adjust the timbre however you see fit. Sample it in a sequencer or trigger them with your MIDI keyboard to build out custom drum parts in your DAW.

Time to decide: What kind of Drum VSTs do you need?

Let's start with some broad strokes before getting into a list of the VST plugins that we like. You'll need to narrow down your music production goals to figure out exactly what you need. Here's a general overview of the most common drum software categories.

Plugins with realistic drum sounds: Go with these if you're trying to mimic a real-life drum kit. You'll be using MIDI input to trigger pre-recorded, acoustic one shots.

Unlike ordinary sample packs from a marketplace like splice, the drum software will include velocity-sensitive multisamples, so you can achieve different levels of softness or loudness depending on how hard you hit the MIDI keyboard. Those volume levels can be fine tuned in the piano roll as well. The plugin might include virtual microphone placement, mixing controls and even drum pattern presets to choose from.

Orchestral and Cinematic drums: Sometimes your run of the mill drum kit just won't cut it. If you're writing for music genres that require more exotic sounds, try exploring symphonic and world music sample libraries to find additional percussion instruments.

We're bundling cinematic percussive sound effects into this category because they're often used for similar projects, in film trailers and movie cues.

Electronic drum kits: First decide if the music you're creating calls for a digital sound. These kits are likely to be synthesized from scratch, but they may also feature sampled drums that have been heavily modified. The plugin should give you control over pitch, envelope, filter settings, modulation, and and other parameters to control the timbre.

Drum machines: It's important to separate ordinary step sequencers from drum machines. On the surface, they both work by programming basic rhythms on a grid interface. Drum machines are unique because they use multitrack rows with on/off conditions instead of pitch values. You don't need the pitch values used by some sequencers to program melodies. Instead, you're likely to find features like step velocity, flam, roll, or groove variations that are specific to rhythm sections.

Drum sample management: If you've been collecting one-shot drum samples for a while, you may have thousands of files stashed somewhere on your hard-drive. There are a few VST plugins that use machine learning to categorize drum sounds with intuitive layouts like a node-cloud. These apps don't work with melodic material or chord progression samples, but they're perfect for percussion sounds.

Drum-specialized EQs and processors: You can mix your drums with any old parametric EQ, but there are some plugins out that have streamlined the process with the most popular drum EQ technique. You can use them to reduce cymbal bleed from the snare, kick drums, and toms.

Automated drum accompaniment: Sometimes a drum machine's just not enough. You want complex rhythm patterns that listen to your existing arrangement and play along with nuance. If that's the case, your best bet is probably artificial intelligence. We'll share some examples of how you can accomplish this.

So that covers all the basics. Hopefully you've got a better sense of what you're looking for and can use this article to pin point the exact software you need.