Monster Drum

Monster Drum covers more genres than any other free drum plugin I’ve seen. Version 3 includes 88 kits across 20 genres: pop, rock, metal, punk, electronic, hip-hop, R&B, synthwave, reggae, jazz, funk, lo-fi, cinematic, industrial, and more. The developer regularly adds new free kits. All included drum kits are pre-mixed and ready to use. All you need to do is load up the plugin, select a kit, and start playing. The multi-out feature lets you route each drum element independently in your DAW’s mixer.

The amount of stuff you get for free here is impressive, but there are trade-offs. The drums can sound flat in acoustic contexts because there’s no room ambiance baked into the samples. Adding reverb helps, but it’s not quite the same as using plugins like SSD Free or BFD Player, which model room microphones. I also noticed a bug where only the first note plays in my DAW, but it doesn’t happen every time.