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Free boom bap plugins: chop, swing, dust and squash

Gazillion Industries ·

The search for free boom bap plugins mostly turns up drum kits, and a kit is the easy half. The sound people are chasing lives in what happened to the drums after they were sampled: the swing, the squash, the dust. All of that can be done without spending anything.

The free boom bap plugin chain is short: a sampler to chop with, swing from your DAW, a filter to take the top and bottom off, and a drum bus compressor to squash the kit into one sound. Your DAW already covers the first three. For the fourth, DRUGS is ours, free for Mac and Windows, and was voiced for breaks.

The short version

Drum bus compression
DRUGS — ours, free, one knob, built for breaks
Chopping
your DAW's own sampler or slicer
Swing
your DAW's groove or swing setting, on the hats first
Dust
a low-pass and a high-pass before anything else
Crunch
a stock bitcrusher at a light setting, or skip it
Tempo
roughly 80–100 BPM

What a boom bap plugin actually has to do

The name is the sound: the boom of the kick and the bap of the snare, heavy, up front, with room around them. Most of that character came from the process. Drums came off records, went through samplers with limited memory and fidelity, got swung by hand and were squashed together on the way to tape. A boom bap plugin chain is that process rebuilt in software.

That splits the job into four parts. Chop and arrange the drums. Swing them so the hats lean. Filter the samples so they sit like they came off a record. Then glue the kit into one sound on the drum bus. The first three are editing and EQ, and every DAW ships the tools. The fourth is where a plugin earns its slot.

The free chain, in order

1. A sampler for chopping

Ableton has Simpler, Logic has Quick Sampler, and FL Studio ships its own slicers. Each slices a break across the keyboard or pads so you can replay it in a new order. You do not need a third-party sampler to start. The break chopping guide walks through the slicing.

2. Swing from the DAW

Swing delays every second sixteenth note. Start around 55 to 60 percent on the hats and leave the kick and snare where they are, then adjust by ear until the pattern leans without dragging. This costs nothing and matters more than any plugin on this page.

3. A filter for the dust

A stock EQ does it. Roll the lows off below roughly 60 Hz and the highs off above 8 to 10 kHz, and the drums move back toward the sound of a sample. The dusty drums guide goes further.

4. A drum bus compressor for the squash

This is the slot that turns separate hits into one kit, and it is the one we built a plugin for. DRUGS has a single control called DOSE. Turn it up and the drums get denser while the peak level barely moves, with the room pushed up under the hits. The release adapts on its own, so the squash recovers between hits instead of pumping across them.

DRUGS at DOSE 88 with MIX at 100 percent, deep gain reduction on every hit.
DOSE 88. Every hit pulls the gain down and the room rises back up behind it before the next one.

How to build boom bap drums with free plugins

  1. Set the project tempo between 80 and 100 BPM.
  2. Load a drum break into your DAW's sampler and slice it at each hit.
  3. Program the kick on beat one, the snare on two and four, and hats in eighths.
  4. Set swing on the hats to 55 percent and raise it until the groove leans.
  5. Route every drum to one bus.
  6. Put an EQ on the bus with a high-pass near 60 Hz and a low-pass near 9 kHz.
  7. Put DRUGS after the EQ and turn DOSE up until the room comes forward.
  8. Compare with DRUGS bypassed at matched level, then play the loop on a phone speaker.

Order matters in step seven. Filter first, compress second, and the compressor reacts to the drums you will hear instead of to rumble and hiss that the filter was about to remove. The chain order guide covers what goes where once more plugins arrive.

DRUGS is the free drum bus compressor in this chain: one knob, Mac and Windows, VST3 and AU. One review on its page: "For crafting retro-style drums or Lo-Fi background textures, DRUGS is incredibly efficient at getting the job done."

Where free runs out

Free covers the whole chain. What it does not cover is time. Every stock device on this list asks for settings, and a boom bap session can lose an hour to the hats' swing percentage alone. That is part of why the drum bus slot gets a one-knob compressor here: one decision instead of six, in the stage where producers most often overthink it.

The other limit is the source. No plugin turns a sterile one-shot into a record. If the kit sounds wrong after the chain, change the drums before you add a fifth plugin. The boom bap drums guide has more on choosing sounds.

Questions people ask

What are the best VSTs for boom bap?

A sampler, a filter, swing and a drum bus compressor do most of the work. Your DAW has the first three. For the drum bus, ours: DRUGS, free for Mac and Windows and voiced for breaks.

Where can I get plugins for free?

From the people who make them. DRUGS downloads from its page here. Avoid sites offering paid plugins for free; that is where the malware risk sits, and the maker never sees a cent.

What are the best free boom bap drum kits?

We make plugins, not kits, so we will not rank them. The route that sounds most like the records is chopping your own breaks, and the Amen break is the most famous starting point there is.

Do I need a compressor for boom bap drums?

Almost always on the drum bus. It is what makes a chopped kit sound like one performance in one room. DRUGS does it with one knob and costs nothing.

What tempo is boom bap?

Most of it sits between roughly 80 and 100 BPM. Slower than that and the swing starts to drag; faster and the snare loses its weight.

What DRUGS does

DRUGS is our free bus compressor for drums. DOSE moves the transfer curve, the knee, the attack and the release together; as it goes up the break gets reshaped rather than leveled and the room comes up under the hits. The release adapts to each hit. MIX blends dry and wet with zero latency, GAIN adds 5 dB after the compressor and LIMIT is a soft ceiling at −0.3 dBFS. It runs in Logic Pro, Ableton Live, FL Studio, Reaper, Cubase, Studio One, Bitwig and GarageBand. VST3, AU and standalone on Mac; VST3 on 64-bit Windows.

The kit was the easy half. The other half was free the whole time.

DRUGS — a one-knob bus compressor for drums, free for Mac and Windows. One control called DOSE, with GAIN and a soft ceiling on the way out.

FREE DRUGS

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