Here’s a great free drum VST from Steven Slate. So here’s the 15 best free drum VST plugins for making your drums pop. They impose some limitations to help you corral the creative juices a bit. That’s why these drum VST plugins are so great.
They’ve become a pillar of modern music production.īut picking a sound can be tough when you have infinite possibilities at your fingertips.
There’s no getting around it.Įvery DAW software these days comes with some sort of sampler or drum machine built right in.
… you can do drums in FL Studio so many different ways.Īnd that’s true about pretty much everything in FL Studio.The drum machine changed music. Which means it’s a really flexible program.īut drums and bass are the heart and soul for most music. It lays the foundation and groove for your track. So let’s look at 5 different ways that you can create and use drums in FL Studio. This is the most straightforward way to start creating drums in FL Studio. When you open up FL Studio, likely you see the Channel Rack Window. This is where you can create patterns for drum kits really easily. The default template that opens in FL Studio has four samples that come preloaded. There is a Kick, a snare, a clap, and a hi hat. This will most likely be your first experience with creating drum patterns.Īnd it’s pretty intuitive. And those buttons tell FL studio when to play the sound. Or you can right click on a sample and tell FL Studio to fill in every 2 steps, or every 4. You can stretch the grid size out, so you can go beyond 1 bar (which is the 4 beats that are loaded in by default. To stretch it out, left click and drag on the right side of the channel rack window. The next thing that you can do is load in other samples. The window on the left side of the FL studio window is the library window. You can open it and close it with the shortcut key ALT+F8. Navigate down to Packs, and then you will see a bunch of folders that are available to you.
You can find other kicks, snares, claps, percussion, effects, etc. If you drag and drop on top of an existing sample in the channel rack, it will replace the sound. The name won’t change, but the sound will. If you do want to change the name you can right click and pick rename, color, etc. That will let you change the name to whatever you want. You can also drag a new sample underneath of the existing samples. That will open up a new sampler in the channel rack.Īnother method is to right click on the sample and select open sample in new channel. One of the things that you will find out as you start to create the drum patterns is it can sound mechanical after a while. Once you have laid in a pattern, you will realize that it’s triggering the sample with the same strength every time.īut that’s not how drums sound in real life. When a person is playing, they don’t hit the drum the same way every time. They might hit it a little softer at some point, or a little louder at another.Īll of these small variations in the level of the sound give it a more organic feel.Īnd FL Studio has a way to change the strength of each hit. There is a button in the top right of the channel rack that looks like this: It’s the one highlighted in a blue color. If you click on that, a window will open up that has several tabs on it. You want to make sure that you are looking at the velocity tab. This is the tab that will allow you to adjust how hard the sample is played. I can adjust the blue bar down to lessen the volume, or the strength that the sample is played at. This can be really effective on kicks when you have two hits side by side. Lowering the volume of one will give it a more natural feel to the listener. So another thing to think about with a drum kit is that the kit itself is spread out around the person who is playing. They may have the snare a little to the right. Maybe a crash or a ride cymbal to the right. The snare will probably be on their left (if they are right handed) as well as the hi hat. So when you start to put together your patterns, you can think about the way the kit might be oriented to help you spread your drums out in the sonic space. Put your drums from left to right to give it a more natural feel. You can place each of the samples by using panning.