

If you are going to have only one drum VST installed on your laptop, then we highly recommend that it’s Toontrack’s Superior Drummer 3. Prepare to start loading up your shopping carts as we take a look at the best drum VSTs available. The best part is that software instruments aimed at capturing the sound of acoustic drums in a pristine studio environment are also incredibly affordable.

In other words, where recording great drum performances was once limited to those with access to a great-sounding kit, a properly treated room, and the mics and ears to capture it, it’s now possible to bring all of those components to the comfort of your spare room and, most importantly, play them for yourself from your electronic kit. Second, electronic drumset response and realism is such that – even when we’re not using our kit’s native sounds – we can fire out detailed MIDI messages to a computer (usually via an onboard audio/MIDI interface to make things even easier) which then plays the aforementioned sounds with nearly no latency. First, our computers are now more than well-equipped to host gigabytes of sound libraries, and what’s more, these samples can temporarily be loaded into our Mac or PC’s RAM for lightning-fast playback.
