Superior Drummer from Toontrack is an immensely deep drumming experience with more control and processing than you’d ever have time for. It is packed with over 230 GB of raw drum goodness and will not only respond correctly to MIDI but, using the Tracker technology, it can pull rhythms off audio tracks and use artificial intelligence to replace the drum sounds with its own.

The included 7 drum kits were recorded with multiple microphones, dozens of different placements and up to 11-channel surround sound for a totally immersive experience. You can mix and match your drums from different kits and from the library of 25 snares and 16 kits plus hundreds of electronic possibilities.

The core library was recorded by award-winning Engineer George Massenburg at the environmentally silent Galaxy Studios in Belgium.

But it’s not all about the sounds. Superior Drummer also has a comprehensive MIDI library of styles, patterns and fills to inspire your tracks. You can get stuck into the multi-track grid editor and start crafting your own grooves. You can build your entire drum track within Superior Drummer rather than writing it in your DAW’s piano roll.

And once you’re ready you can start mixing and blending sounds in the virtual mixing studio, complete with channel strips, 35 mixer effects and a wide range of presets for every drum type. So, if you don’t want to do all the work yourself let Superior Drummer show you what usually works best.

It’s an immense drum studio in a single piece of software that you can keep on expanding with further sound packs. It doesn’t get better than this.

Street Price: $399
toontrack.com

Addictive Drums is slightly less intimidating than Superior Drummer. It has a friendly (if slightly dated-looking) interface that is happy to provide you with fantastic sounds, kits, and grooves without you having to understand drum engineering — unless you want to.

The highlight is that it comes with three amazing sounding drum kits and a huge library of MIDI grooves recorded by some of the best Drummers in the business. The Fairfax kits were recorded at the legendary Los Angeles studio formerly known as Sound City. The XLN Audio Engineers have produced 130 presets setups, ranging from highly polished through to heavily processed and distorted.

While many of AD2’s best features revolve around the ease of use for the non-Engineer there’s plenty of depth you can go to if you want to tweak and craft the sounds. There’s a 10-channel mixer plus overheads, room and bus channels with individual EQ and transient shaping, compression, and distortion. You have control over how the drums respond, the envelope and noise content. You can also add delay and reverb.

With the integrated MIDI groove system you can audition beats and rhythms and then drag-and-drop them as audio or MIDI directly into your DAW’s timeline.

I really like the immediacy of AD2 and how well the kits fit into the music I’m already working on without me having to spend loads of time mixing and processing them.

Street Price: $149
xlnaudio.com

EZDrummer can step into the role of a creative partner. It’s not just a bunch of kits, but it’s a pattern machine, a groove engine and is ready to take your lead.

It comes with about 15GB of samples sorted into seven drum kits with some additional snares, kicks and cymbals so that you can customise and get the exact right combination. All of it is tweaked and tailored to feel mix-ready so it takes all the hard work out of getting the kit to sound right in your music. It has an integrated editor and sequencer and a huge library of grooves and patterns. Or, if that sounds like too much work then use the new Bandmate feature to throw EZDrummer a riff and it will simply play along.

If you want it to sound different then you can push EZDrummer into other styles of playing, chop and changing ideas and experiment until you’re right in the pocket of that groove. You can slice and dice it again and again, rearrange and work in more parts until the Song Track is bursting with your beats.

EZDrummer prides itself on being the easiest virtual drummer to play with. But it does that without sacrificing the creative options or quality of results.

Street Price: $99
toontrack.com

It was a long time coming but version 5 of Steven Slate Drums has been rebuilt from the ground up and offers some interesting features alongside stunning drum sounds.

It has a new physically modeled algorithm that recreates the sound of a drummer hitting a drum. So it’s not just triggering the drums, it’s playing the drums with a very natural and realistic response.

SSD5 takes a different approach to constructing kits. They’ve used the individual recording of 84 kicks, 77 snares, 58 toms and so on to create many different and varying kits that give a whole range of flavors. You can build your own, of course, but you can also browse through expertly constructed kits to find the feel and character that you’re after.

There’s plenty of depth here with microphone customization, routing options and tuning. You can customize the velocity and dynamic curves for each drum and tweak the tone to be exactly what you want. In the mixer page, you can bring in ambient microphones, change panning positions and get the blend of sounds exactly right before routing to your DAW.

SSD5 is quick and easy to use with fantastic and immediately usable sounds and functions. Although it’s less of a focus it does also come with hundreds of MIDI grooves to get the drums pumping. You can also download the software with an entire kit for free and use it right now.

Street Price: $149
stevenslatedrums.com

Let’s move over to the more electronic side of things (although there’s plenty of places where they cross over). Nerve is a powerful beat manipulator and pattern created with a diverse and interesting sample library. It was designed by what they call “veteran dance music producers” and that should give you a clue as to what this plugin is all about.

Nerve comes with a 2GB library of presets, drumkits, patterns, hits and loops from world-class Sound Designers crossing many genre boundaries. Or you can import your own samples just by dropping them onto any one of the 16 pads in a kit. You can slice and dice samples across those pads, set loop points, stretch, sculpt, resynthesize and do a lot of other sample processing.

Sequencing is easy and it occupies the top half of the interface. It combines nicely with modulation pages, velocity, filtering and other processes that you can apply to the track for the selected pad. You can extract grooves from other places like REX files to apply directly to your tracks. There are some great performance features where you can re-trigger pads on-the-fly, create fills and variations and enabled the Repeater function to keep things moving.

Each pad has a fat-sounding filter with flexible LFO modulation, multi-stage envelopes, gates, and an internal side-chain compressor to pump those kicks.

Nerve has been around a long time but it remains one of the most engaging beat-making and manipulating plugins around.

Street Price: $149
xferrecords.com

Sometimes the best things in life are free and Vintage Drums from Spitfire Labs is one of those times. It’s also undoubtedly the simplest drum VST in this list. The interface barely gives you anything, but that’s not the point of this plugin.

The point is that you load it up and you play. No need to endlessly fiddle with mic positions, or sizzle settings, you have a kit that’s ready to play. In fact you get two classic kits. The first is a Ludwig kit from 1974 with a 26″ bass drum made famous by John Bonham of Led Zeppelin. The second is a 1940s custom kit fitted with calfskin heads. Both are sampled through fully analogue studios for a warmth and a presense that are hard to come by.

You have a little bit of control over the size of the room, how much grit you want in the sound and a level of reverb, but ultimately these kits are what they are. Beautifully recorded, playable and completely free.

Street Price: $0
Spitfireaudio.com

You so rarely come across brushed kits in drum and percussion plugins; it’s like no one ever heard of the concept of playing softly. Well, let Brushify Pro fill your need for something a bit more nuanced, jazzy and beautifully artistic.

It’s not complicated. You have a single kit with a few presets and a handful of settings to adjust for each drum. You can adjust the relative levels, move the placement in the stereo field, add a bit of width or resonance. There are two keys that trigger an actual sweep on the snare rather than a hit and you’ve got a bit of control over that too.

Now all you have to do is sit back and let your fingers run those brushes. It’s quite a sublime experience of gentle percussive engagement. The interface is minimal and lovely to look at. Brushify Pro is a little bit dreamy.

Street Price: $39
Sampleson.com

They say Playbeat is the world’s smartest groove machine. It uses artificial intelligence to pull together patterns based on what you like. It will take your meagre programming skills and generate infinite variations while maintaining the feel and creativity of your original vision. No two patterns are ever the same. Intrigued?

The idea is that you can train Playbeat to learn your preferred patterns. It then adapts to your style and generates beats to suit your preferences. The more you play with it, the better it becomes at finding your groove. It uses multiple algorithms to analyse your rhythms and produce something different.

So, you’ll always have new ideas and varied possibilities at your fingertips.

Playbeat contains 8 sequencers that include parameters such as density, flam, volume, pan and pitch shifting. You can drop in any samples you like, edit and randomise values. You can add folders of samples, manage the layout and export as MIDI or audio. If you want to run Playbeat into other drum instruments, plugins or hardware, then you can.

Playbeat is enormously flexible and will have you toying with beats you thought you were settled on to find completely new grooves. It’s really fascinating.

Street Price: $69
AudioModern.com