Judd Madden Drum Samples is a free collection of acoustic drum hits in WAV format, sampled from an old Dolfin drum kit and released as a freebie download by Judd Madden.
The pack contains 118 drum samples in total and they’re sorted into 13 separate folders by type. You get one kick, one snare, three toms, hi-hats, crash cymbals, ride, splash and a china cymbal. The samples are provided in 32-bit WAV format.
What I absolutely loved about this kit is the fact that the samples are captured with tons of natural room reverb. They sound absolutely HUGE. Of course, this will either be the reason why you’ll love this kit or why you’ll find it completely useless. It all depends on whether or not you prefer to use drum samples which already have so much natural reverb. This kit reminds me a lot of the old Big Mono kit (featured in our free drum samples round-up), which is also well-known for having tons of natural room sound.
All of the included samples sound very nice, but the winners for me are the kick and the floor tom. Even if I don’t end up using this kit in a tune, I will definitely be using those samples for layering and sound design. By the way, the samples are provided completely free of charge with no strings attached. The author would still appreciate if you send him a link to the project in which you’ve used the samples, though.
The samples were recorded with up to eleven velocity layers and there are no round robin variations included. The download pack also doesn’t include any sampler mappings, so you’ll need to create those yourself. If I find some free time this week, I might prepare a set of SFZ or NKI mappings for this kit and upload them as a free download on this page.
I remember that only four or five years ago, there were only a couple of decent free acoustic drum SoundFonts available and a handful of good free acoustic drum sample libraries. I used to spend hours searching for some good free drum samples online. Nowadays, it’s actually getting harder to pick only one free drum kit for your track. I think I have more than 20 free acoustic drum kits on my computer, and that’s after deleting quite a few which I downloaded but never actually used. Good times to be a musician!
Btw, EPIC demo track alert! It’s actually not just a demo track, but the first track from an album which you can download for free via Bandcamp. Perhaps it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I loved the track and I’ll listen to the rest of the album later on.
Audio Demo
Check out the Judd Madden Drum Samples audio demo:
Download
Judd Madden Drum Samples is available for free download via Judd Madden’s website (63.5 MB download size, ZIP archive, contains 118 drum samples in 32-bit WAV format).
