50 Best Acoustic Drum Kit Samples

(including lots of great FREE drum samples!)

 

We all know the big players in the market – BFD, SSD, SD, AD, … But we tried to find some more exotic, less-known drum libraries, samples, sample packs, kits and samplers / drum sampling applications.
Ofcourse, some of you will recognize lot of them, but I’m sure there are names nobody heard of. There’s (as of last update) more than 70 (!) drum sample providers here (hundreds of kits/libraries/bundles) and lots of freebies.
This page is being constantly updated, so be sure to check back again

Last update: 20 January 2016.
Note: Listed in no particular order.

Update: Drumdrops

Drumdrops have a great reputation for their live drum tracks. Now they have started releasing Sample Packs. The first kit available is a 1963 Premier Outfits 54 Kit Recorded at Miloco’s The Pool available as a Kontakt 5 kit, or two other packs a multi-velocity pack and a simpler 3 velocity pack. Both of these can be imported into any sampler or drum machine. Update: there are new kits in their pool: Rogers Big R Dub, Gretsch 1960s Round Badge, 1965 Ludwig Super Classic, Yamaha Hybrid, Mapex Heavy Rock, …

Analogue Drums

More than 10 kits, and even a free one. Up to 16 dynamic samples per key. All snare drums, toms, hi-hats and ride cymbals have separate left-handed and right-handed samples. Compatible with Kontakt.

Ocean Way Drums

Recorded in Ocean Way Studios. Compatible with Kontakt. These are probably one of the best sounding drum samples currently available.

Drum Werks

Fully sampled drum kits or individual sample packs of kicks, snares, toms, crash cymbals, rides, hihats, and percussion – all meticulously recorded, mixed, and edited for use in your music.

Groove Bias: Vintage Drum Sounds

The library contains nearly 4,000 samples (4 gigabytes) across three custom drum kits and a set of percussion. There is also a FREE version of this kit. Compatible with Kontakt.

Truth Drum Samples

High-end samples of Truth Drums.

Joey Sturgis Drum Samples

Kits like Truth Custom Black and Gold, Masters One [Cymbals] etc. Wav files. Compatible with Drumagog and Kontakt.

Voxengo AcuDrums

Professional sound sample library that captures acoustical sound of various drum and cymbal instruments. Samples are stored in plain WAV format, with MIDI drum instrument files available in NKI (Native Instruments Kontakt 3.5/4; Kontakt Player in demo mode only) and SFZ (Cakewalk Session Drummer 2 and 3) formats.

Drumasonic

Use as VST, AU, RTAS Plug-in or as stand-alone application. DRUMASONIC ensures an authentic playing experience. Compatible with Kontakt.

forthemix Radio Drummer

forthemix currently has 3 drums sample libraries. One of them is Radio Drummer and there’s also NickelDrums and Drumamore. They all work on Kontakt and the cost is $19-$29 per library.

Invictus Audio

Currently only Metal pack. Drumagog and Trigger formats.

Alive Underground Drums

3 high-end drum kits (Gretsch New Classic, Sonor 3007, Ludwig Legacy) with 5 great snares. More than 2500 samples in 44.1 kHz 24 bit stereo with full sustain and dynamics (2.3 GB on drive, ncw lossless format). Requires Kontakt 4.2.3 or above. £19.99

Seraph Samples

Lots of kit pieces samples; like Peace, Wolf, Pork, OCDP snares; Pearl Vision and Spaun toms. And a bundle for $69.99. WAV, .NKI, .GOG, and .TCI formats.

The Ultimate Drum Bundle

Contains 17 Kicks, 19 Toms and 18 snares recorded with top of the line microphones, preamps and converters. Presets for trigger and drumagog. 50€

Studio Drummer

Compatible with Kontakt. Features Pearl Masters Premium Maple kit, Yamaha Maple Custom Absolute kit and Sonor SQ2 Drum System.

Abbey Road Drummer Series

Compatible with Kontakt.

Platinum Samples

Huge Variety of drum libraries. Like Andy Johns Classic Drums, Joe Barresi Evil Drums, Rock Legends QuickPack, … Mostly for BFD, but also for Session Drummer.

Paragon Samples

Their very first library is Nave Q Studio Kit. 24bit WAVs, Steven Slate Trigger TCI Files and Drumagog GOG Files

Ultimate Drum Samples by drums.sk

6000 sounds, Sound Manager application (for easy sound selection and one-click conversion to 16-bit format).

Room Sound

Kit pieces and bundles. Ayotte and DW Custom Maple kits. Formats: .DRT, .NKI, .TCI, GOG, .WAV. $85 for the complete bundle.

Mixosaurus

With 145GB of drum samples, this probably THE largest drum sample library. It comes shipped pre-installed on its own hard drive. Works with Kontakt.

Acoustic Samples

Several kits and one bundle pack. Comes with its own sample player, the UVI Workstation 2 (requires v2.0.4 or later).

Vir2 Studio Kit Builder

130 drum kit pieces and more than 50 prebuilt drum kits. Multiple mic positions and multi-track mixing of the kit. $200. Works in Kontakt 5.

Studio Seven Drums

Includes close mic and overhead samples, with full control over individual levels, compression and ambience. Compatible with Kontakt.

Anemic Studios Samples

Kontakt, WAV and TCI files. Each Drum Sample type has Multi Velocities and various Hits. Product programming (for Kontakt), scripting and sample editing.

VR Musicgroup Samples

Snares and kicks and one “Everything Bundle” for $20. Comes with Wav, TCI, and NKI’s.

Ryan Greene Alt Drums

Nine carefully recorded drum kits played by five outstanding drummers with three different microphone settings, all masterfully engineered and put together by a legendary punk rock producer. For Reason.

Wavesfactory

Great pricing, pretty good sound. Several kits, including Tea Towel Drum, Brush Drum, Black Toms, … V-Drum ready. Compatible with Kontakt 3.5. Very affordable.
Update: they have a new library called Classic Rock Drums.

Scarbee Imperial Drums

48GB drumset library has both ready-to-play GM kits and totally unprocessed multi-mic kits that you mix as if the tracks had been recorded with a live drummer.

Orbinator/Larson ‘rock’ sample library

The Orbinator/Larson ‘rock’ sample library contains over 100 drum hits (total) of varying dynamics on a four-piece drum kit.

Big Bang Universal Drums

Deeply Sampled Custom Made SJC Drum Kit with 2 different snare drums.

Jet-City by Purrrfect Audios

16GB od samples, Vdrum optimized kits included, Dedicated decay & stick-position control, Auto alternate left/right hands.

Drummix

Drummix is a collection of acoustic drum plugins recorded at a professional recording studio with pristine equipment. The plugins comes in both a stereo and multiple output versions. The user has the possibilities to mix each recorded microphone like a real drum kit.

Drums Overkill

More than 1200 drum kits classified to 16 different music-styles. Compatible with Kontakt.

Reason Drum Kits 2.0

Reason Drum Kits 2 gives you masterfully multisampled, perfectly playable, totally recallable multi-output drum kits for Reason’s Combinator.

Sampleholics Acoustic Kits

For Stylux RMX.

SampleCraze drum samples

Featuring sample packs like Vintage Cymbales, Moneyshot Hi Hats, Remastered Tom Drum Samples …

Jamstix

Edrums VSTi. 8 stereo outputs and an extensive sound library (1.3GB) that can be expanded via expansion Paks.

LSD drum samples

Complete kit, or just snare, or kick, …

MT Power Drum Kit

AU / VST Instrument. It has already pre-processed the sounds with compressors and EQs. $50. Free demo available.

Supreme Drums

Drum set-up with 19 available pieces and over 10 different kits (including DW, Ludwig and Sonor). Recorded in Ocean Way Studios, The Record Plant and Abbey Road Studios. Free demo available.

Solid Drums V1.0

Over 1.3 Gig of data in over 16,000 single-shot wav files. Plus over 25 playable kits in Kontakt, and Battery formats and over 15 GURU kits too. $24.95.

Straight Ahead! Jazz Drums

Including loops and samples (up to 7 velocity layers & 4 round-robins). Channeling the essence, sound, and the swing of great jazz drummers like Max Roach, Elvin Jones, … $179.99

Parallel Focus Studio’s drum samples

These sample sets are designed for producer’s looking for a very heavy yet natural sound. These samples are all custom made and slightly EQ’d to create perfectly balanced and well rounded drum tones … Bundle: 60$

Jazz Drum Sample Instrument

Includes both stick and brush samples on a vintage 4-piece ’60s Gretsch kit — a popular choice among the best players in jazz. 10 velocities left and right snare hits on a limited-edition, 75th anniversary Noble & Cooley snare. For Reason Refill (NN-XT sampler), Logic ESX24, Kontakt, Structure (Pro Tools) and Garageband Mac (not iPad) $17.95

DruMOD

Bodies and hi-hats have been recorded one by one with three separate microphones, while snare got a nice four-mike treatment. Multiple round robin and velocity levels. $16.

Glasswall Samples

WAV and TCI format. NKI format will be available soon. As well as several new drumkits.

Snare Pack Deluxe

Over 1400 samples of snare drums and 24 NI Kontakt patches. €24. They also have tom, cymbals and kick packs.

=======

Freebies:

 

Update: DrumGizmo

DrumGizmo is an open source cross-platform drum plugin and stand-alone application. It is comparable to several commercial drum plugin products.
They have so far 3 drum kits sampled, ready for free download.

That Sound

That Sound is offering two free demo packs featuring sample from its forthcoming commercial drum sample libraries.

DrumCircle Lite by Wavesfactory

+6GB of drum samples. 6x round robin and 6 velocities. Multioutput, remapping function and velocity curve control. Natural bleeding. Requires Kontakt.

DrumMic’a by Sennheiser

4.8GB of drum samples. You can change mics, adjust bleeds, velocity curves, … Requires Kontakt.

SCC Drums by SignalsAudio

1.5GB, 4 Snares, 5 Sets of Toms, 4 Kicks. Includes raw .wav samples. Compatible with Kontakt, Drumagog 5 and Trigger.

Acoustic Personal Drum kit v1.1

Multi-layered kit with up to 30 velocities. GM map. Compatible with Kontakt and Session Drummer.

DrumSamples.ca

Vintage Funk, Heavy Metal and Rock and Vintage Pop / Rock Drum Samples. All 3 kits completely free! Wav files. Compatible with Ableton Live.

G&S Custom Drum Kit by Salvador Peláez

Probably one of the best freebies out there currently. Available in various formats.

Jazz Funk Kit by Orange Tree Samples

Together with G&S, this is my favorite free sample kit! Skilled jazz drummers can make a single drum sound very expressive, bringing out its character. SFZ format.

Tchakpoum Drum kit

A free 265MB drum kit. Compatible with Shortcircuit, Groove Agent One, Drummagog, Battery 3 and Kontakt 4.

Salamander Drumkit

It doesn’t have many velocity layers, but instead many samples per velocity, in an attempt to get a more authentic sound when programming. SFZ format.

Live Kit 7

Free 65MB drumset soundfont. And here are some SFZ mappings for it.

Ruffrider and Easyrider

Available in various formats.

Vinyl Drumkits

Pretty basic, but free. Compatible with Kontakt.

The Poor Man Rock Drumkit

Less than 5 MB, format SFZ, SF2, POISE drum sampler.

Basement Drums

Captured at 44.1kHz/24bit using only a pair of Shure SM57s and an Apogee Duet, Basement Drums captures the authentic sound of an average drum kit with round robin layering and multiple velocities. For times when other drum sounds are too “clean”, “produced” or “even” Basement Drums could be your secret weapon.

The Open Source Drum Kit

Huge library with sfz and other mappings.

VOXX L2S Project

The VOXX Sound Laboratory has released some free Acoustic Drum Samples under the Creative Commons license (Sampling Plus 1.0).

NSA Custom Series Drumkit

A total of 777 samples, 16bit/44kHz mono .wav format (132 MB). Great samples, but sadly there are no patches.

DrumTAsteFree

The DrumTAsteFree is a Rick Marotta Signature Hipgig drum set with paiste cymbals.

Big Daddy Drums

Several acoustic drum kit multisamples available in16bit/44.1khz AIFF, ReFill, and EXS24 formats.

1965 Ludwig Super Classic

Requires a full working version of Kontakt 4 (Because it uses scripts from the Kontakt 4 Library) Although you can demo the kit in Native Instruments free Kontakt player, available from their website.

Sam Greene Sonor Force 3001

A great acoustic kit that is very flexible. Sonor Force 3001 sampled and painstakingly placed into EXS24. There are at least 4 velocity levels for each sound.

Culture Collection

The Culture Collection features 158 drum samples spanning three different acoustic drum sets. Recorded at Urthwurk Labs in Orlando, FL.

MyDrumset

A plugin in beta version. Has 3 presets: Rock, Rock Olympic and 70′s.

vstplanet.com Free studio drum samples

The Cracken Snare and FVF Custom Maple Kit

DrumCore FREE

This is a free edition of the DrumCore player and it comes with 2 free drum kits.

Vinnie Paul (Snakeskin) 14×8

TinySnare

The TinySnare is a 12′ wooden snare drums, We recorded it with a lot of different hits, separated left and right hands. There is even two mcrophones,, one up and one down.

615 Cymbal Samples by Erkan and Epic Drum Samples by TheWinterSnow

yPPses Drum Samples

Samples: 24bit/48kHz, HALion & lm4mkII Programs. Pearl Masters Studio drumkit.

Supersonic Samples HQ Snare & Kick samples

All samples are Hard hits that will punch thru any mix and all samples are a combination of two mics- one dynamic and one condenser.

thecontrolcentre Samples

For Ableton Live Drum Rack.


 

Even more FREE samples:

 

futureproducers.com FREE drum kits thread

Dozens of personal or freeware drum kits and vsts.

Ultimate Metal Forum FREE drum kits thread

Blog on free drum samples

Drums Sound Fonts