Last Updated on January 9, 2025 by IDS Team
We’ve covered a lot of sub topics surrounding metal guitar – from the best vsts, to the best pedals – and even sub genres like post metal. Nevertheless, drum plugins for metal are a whole different story. In a genre where drummers are absolutely integral and nuance abounds with regards to getting jsut the right tone, it can be frustrating to not be able to replicate the sound of a live recorded drum kit from your DAW.
However, these plugins go a long way to alleviating this, and a good drum vst is jsut as important as having a good heavy metal guitar vst. So, we’ll break down wat goes into picking the best metal drum vst across multiple categories – with some great prices, too.
Best Artist Specific VST Metal Drum Kit: Mixwave Gojira
One way of getting your desired sound – and knowing what you’re getting – is to go for an artist specific plugin. That way, you can emulate the tones of your favorite bands while still adding your own touch. What’s more, these plugins are also great value for money and often high quality with lots of thought behind them.
They are created in tandem with the musicians whose names they carry. If you want something less generic, and that feels intuitive for you as an artist, they are often a great choice. One of our top choices is the Mixwave Gojira, based off the eponymous band’s Mario Duplantier.
Mixwave Gojira excels because it offers the following:
- Compressor, EQ, and Tape Saturation
- Get the sound of Gojira’s Mario Duplantier
- Raw samples as well as mix ready – mixer based interface at your fingertips
- Ability to replace, layer, and blend sound files in raw or mixed state with a Slate Trigger library of drum replacement files
- Fully compatible with Native Instruments and works with Kontakt Player
Specs: MacOS 13.5 to 14 and Windows 7 to 11; uses Kontakt player in vST, AU, AAX, and Standalone formats, average 14gb requirements
Price: 140 USD or 110 GBP but reduced currently to 66 GBP or 85 USD
Find it here: https://mixwave.com/products/gojira-mario-duplantier?srsltid=AfmBOorD2thD_Y0pitQKdND8UZqnTyI4kbjzWSxfTCRceXWFv-U0Xf0S
Best Generic Drum Plugin For Metal: Superior Drummer VST
Superior Drummer 3 may not necessarily be designed specifically for metal, but it has a ton of features that we think makes it worthy of a place on this list. The creative dynamism behind it means that it works really well with complex metal tracks and gives you more scope and options than other comparable generic drum VSTs.
So, overall, Super Drummer Ranks as one of the best VSTs for metal that can also be used across the board, coming with the following features:
- Ability to stack additional drum sounds and hits over parts of your chosen kit
- Superior combination of electronic and acoustic drums lets this straddle genre slike pop punk and industrial as well as nu and prog metal
- Mixer, EQ, and velocity make this one of the most precise kits of this list with a greater amount of creative control
- High quality presets to spark off your inspiration
- Ability to import custom samples
- Macro controls let you control multiple parameters at once with seamless integration
Specs: 64 bit windows 7 or newer, mac OS 10.10 or higher, VST, AU, and AAX compatible host (standalone included), minimum 64 bit host
Price: 319 – 399 EUR or 338 – 423 USD
Find it here: https://www.toontrack.com/product/superior-drummer-3/
Best Metal Drum VST Company: Ugritone
Whilst not a singular plugin, we had to include Ugritone overall on this list as a farewell to a specialist company that has been serving metalheads since 2017. With Ugritone closing down, we’re taking the chance to shout out their incredibly designed plugins. These are not just the general metal, punk, or hard rock drums sets you may get with other VST designs.
Instead, Ugritone genuinely understands the genre, its subgenres, and nuances, and put together affordable and accessible kits that offer you all you need to either get started or take your production to the next level. The kits feel like there was real human creativity behind them, and if their powerful tones don’t blow you away, they come with distinct enough aesthetics that they should also give you a jolt of inspiration, too.
Ugritone plugins stand out with a stellar range of features, including:
- Packs include ‘Drums Against Humanity’, Modern Doom Drums, which spans genres from sludge to indie; OSDM Drums, KVLT Drums 2 for black and death metal, and more
- All packs use Ugritone’s own powerful sampling engine for realistic samples that contain all the sonic nuance and atmosphere you would desire
- Multiple drum and cymbal sets for increase tone choice
- Meticulously crafted presets help you make creative choices in context
- Packs can be bought together more cheaply or as part of a larger bundle
- Metal specialist company works closely and creatively to record and develop packs inspired by and in tandem with real musicians in the various subgenres
Specs: VST, AU, AAX, 64 bit minimum Windows 7 or higher macOS 10.9 or higher
Price: varies depending on which pack you are getting
Best Metal Drum VST For More Advanced Producers: Drumforge Bergstrand
Drumforge Bergstrand stands out because although it’s metal specific, many of its features are ones producers in any genre would be jealous of. This is a plugin which is set up completely with the musician in mind, allowing for unprecedented levels of tonal control beyond what you might get from a basic drum sample pack and with features that can integrate seamlessly with the rest of your set up.
The VST was designed with Daniel Bergstrand of Meshuggah, In Flames, Behemoth, and more, giving you the sonic sensibilities of one of the most powerful behind the scene influences in metal over the past couple of decades.
Why Is Drumforge Bergstrand So Good?
In short, Drumforge Bergstrand screams ‘made for metal’, but has a real level of thought behind it’s design, too, offering the following selection of features:
- More than a simple artist collaboration, Daniel Bergstrand was personally beind the recording of all the drum samples in this VST
- Ability to load your own wav files for total tonal control
- Engineer individual drum sounds yourself for additional creative power behind your sound
- Built in mixing desk
- Song builder allows for quick writing the basics of a track using Drumforge Groove Packs
- Midi mapping for other samplers
- 13 kicks, 19 snares, china, 3 sets of toms including one set of 6, 2 hi hats, 2 crashes, 3 rides, and a crash ride
Specs: Windows 7 or higher, MacOS 10.8 or higher, both in VST2, VST3 and AU formats. Must have 64 bit intel with additional specific requirements for cubase and protools users
Price: 118 GBP or 151 USD but currently REDUCED to 63 GBP or 80 USD
Best VST Metal Drum Kit For Cross Genre Fusion: Get Good Drums
Get Good Drums is a general, all purpose drum VST manufacturer with a slight leaning towards metal and heavier genres. As a result, their affordable and complete VST sample packs hit the sweet spot between applicable across genres, and heavy and gnarly enough to meet all your needs for mimicking the sound of a huge setup whilst in the comfort of a bedroom studio or similar space.
Its multiple sample packs include names like ‘One Kit Wonder: Brutal’ as well as collaborations with top artists and producers. Samples are always crisp, clean, perfectly tunes, and relatively timeless, offering genre specific tones with a stripped back attitude that does what it says on the tin and does it really well.
Why Is Get Good Drums Such A Powerful Plugin?
Get Good Drums will help you do exactly what its name suggests, offering the following setup just on it’s ‘One Kit Wonder: Metal’ pack alone:
- Works with Kontakt Player without requiring additional software
- Full Native Instruments Compatibility
- Built in parallel compression, master EQ, and reverb
- Mix ready drum tones
- Endorsement by some of the masterminds behind artists like Motionless in White and Plini
- Built in groove player
- Easy to visualise your playing with an interface that marks parts of the kit as they play
- Perfectly tuned drums result in crisp, modern, and powerful tracks every single time
There are slight individual variations across packs, but overall, Get Good Drums is atrusty and reliable company that offers highly affordable software that is not only high quality but also presents a diverse range of subgenres and sounds for everything a modern musician might need.
Apart from its own brand, basic packs, we like the special collaborations Get Good Drums have done with musicians such as Benny Greb as well as the signature pack in tandem with Matt Halpern of Periphery, including its Periphery V signature – with the exact drum tones captured during the making of their 7th studio album, Djent is Not a Genre.
Specs: most compatible with kontakt player and native instruments hardware; MacOS 10.13 or higher, or windows 10 or higher, standalone, vst, au, and aax formats for mac (64 bit) and standalone, vst, and aax formats for windows (32 or 64 bit)
Price: varies depending on the pack you choose
Find it here: https://www.getgooddrums.com/collections/all-products?srsltid=AfmBOopJ-QPv1dXglnRx9_qOPUso5VoTmYzV497WKs0TtcTYNWQFo90O
Final Thoughts
Overall, this is a motley collection of powerful drums as well as artist specific sounds that can help you add character and realism to your bedroom production. We’ve tried to include a bit for every genre, and hopefully some of these will be useful for fans of other adjacent genres, too.
We’ve done quite a bit on metal gear simply because it’s so specialist – and we link to some of our other lists in the introduction to this article. But, if you want to find more great vsts and software in general, including artist-branded and emulators, check out our software section here.
