SL Drums is a free sample based virtual drum machine released by Samplelock, available as a 32-bit and 64-bit VST/AU plugin for Windows and Mac OS based digital audio workstations (made with Maize Sampler).
I honestly wasn’t expecting much from this drum rompler in the first place, however I was positively surprised while testing it. What SL Drums lacks in terms of functionality and versatility, it makes up for with a rather decent collection of drum sounds that are bundled with the instrument. And even though it certainly isn’t a flawless collection of hip hop drum kits, there are several great sounding drum kits in there that definitely make it worth the download, at least as an instrument for jamming and sketching out new ideas.
Let’s talk about the bundled drums first. The instrument comes with fifteen drum kits (8 samples per kit), with stereo and multi-out versions for each kit. You can use the multi-out kits to route each drum hit to a different mixer channel in your DAW and process them individually. The sound great, for the most part. There are tons of hard hitting drums, mostly those old school “banger” style hip hop drum samples that I’m a big fan off. The main problem here, though, is that the drum samples can’t be changed within a kit (this is a limitation of Maize Sampler which was used to create the plugin), thus limiting you to the pre-made kits. Since some of the kick drums have been over-saturated (at least for my taste), it would be great to have the option to change an individual drum hit and choose between different alternatives, but this is not the case.
As for the interface, it is nicely designed and it features all the control parameters you can get in a Maize Sampler based plugin. There are pan and volume controls for each hit, along with global controls for volume, pitch and reverb. The interface also features eight drum pads, which can be quite useful for live performances if you have access to a touch sensitive monitor (my recommendation if you’d like to get such functionality would be to buy a cheap Windows tablet such as Chuwi Vi8).
To sum it up, you should definitely give this plugin a try if you’re a hip hop producer who is looking for a free source of drum hits. SL Drums is easy to use and it comes with quite a few excellent drum hits. It would be great to have the option to customize the pre-made drum kits, but this is certainly not a deal breaker. The plugin works on both PC and Mac based DAWs and it’s completely free to download.
SL Drums is available for free download via Samplelock (600 MB download size, ZIP archive, 32-bit & 64-bit VST/AU plugin format for Windows & Mac OS).
Last Updated on June 4, 2016 by Tomislav Zlatic.
