By Will Betts, August 12 2025

Chasing tighter, punchier drums and a faster workflow? You’re in the right place. This best drum VST round-up is tuned for minimal/deep tech, but the picks work across all kinds of electronic dance music.

Sure, Ableton’s Drum Rack and Simpler can take you a long way, but when you want more control, these plugins deliver. Expect kick synthesis, classic drum machine grit, step sequencing, and more.

How did we choose? We prioritized tools trusted by Syntho artists and widely-used industry picks built for modern underground production.

TL;DR: Best drum VSTs for minimal / deep tech

These are our top picks. Tap to jump straight to each review:

• Sonic Academy Kick 3 (Best drum VST for re-synthesizing kicks)
• Roland Cloud TR-909 (Best drum VST for classic 909 tone)
• Meat Beats Vinyl House Drums (Best drum VST for vinyl-sourced house kits)
• Korg ELECTRIBE-R (Best drum VST for groovebox patterns that fill out beats)
• SINEE Chop Suey (Simplest kick designer VST)
• E-MU Mo’ Phatt (Kontakt) (Best instrument for ’90s ROMpler flavour)
• Special Mentions: Nicky Romero Kickstart, NI Transient Master

(Want prices and pros/cons? Scroll down to each pick.)

Sonic Academy Kick 3

What is Kick 3?
A modern kick-drum synthesizer that can also import and analyze any kick sample, even from full tracks. It can then re-synthesize the sub and transient with deep control, layering, FX, and EQ. This makes it one of the best drum VST choices for precise kick design.

What is Kick 3 good for?
If you find a near-perfect kick but need tweaks a sampler can’t easily do, it’s a brilliant tool. It lets you tune the sub bass separately from the body of a sound, define its pitch over time, and has a huge library of 500+ clicks and 540+ presets for getting your attack just right. Plus, once you’ve edited your kick exactly as you want it, you can drag the edited sample straight onto your DAW timeline, or trigger the plugin with MIDI. You can even trigger it with audio from another track to beef up an existing kick. 

What are the downsides of Kick 3?
Its power can be overwhelming to production newcomers. The envelopes, layering and FX go pretty deep. Its focus is pretty solely kicks (though you can also use it to make a fairly convincing snare) meaning you’re best off looking elsewhere if you want tight control over claps, hats and percussion.

Which artists use Kick 3?
Kick 3 has loads of big-name producers who swear by it, including Deadmau5, Nicky Romero, Calvin Harris and Sebastian Ingrosso.

Kick 3 alternatives?
RARE/DSP Drumclone is a free plugin that’s currently in beta, that resynthesizes kicks from audio. It’s a similar extract-and-rebuild concept if you want to dip a toe in to those waters, but aren’t ready to commit to Kick 3.

Price: £63.96 sale on Sonic Academy (reg. £79.95). Prices fluctuate with promos.

Roland Cloud TR-909

What is TR-909 (plugin)?
The TR-909’s sounds were essential to the development of house and techno music. And even after 40 years, 909 kicks, claps and hats are still a mainstay of most house subgenres. Roland’s official emulation of the 1983 drum machine adds a modern multi-lane sequencer, flams, sub-steps, drag-and-drop MIDI/audio, and even hardware integration with the TR-8S Rhythm Performer and TR-09 Boutique drum machines.

What is the TR-909 plugin good for?
Its straight-ahead 909 thump, crispy hats and iconic claps are perfect for tech house and minimal when you want authentic 80s machine tone. Its Analog Circuit Behavior (ACB) modelling also means that you can authentically drive the circuits for each sound for a more upfront effect. And because of its per-voice decay and tune knobs, it’s easy to automate your drums to add extra movement to your tracks. It remains one of the best drum VST options for classic machine tone.

What are the TR-909 plugin’s downsides?
It’s just a 909, so you’re buying a very specific palette. It’s also pricier than sample packs that cover 909 hits.

Which artists use the TR-909?
The original 909 has been used by everyone from Frankie Knuckles to Daft Punk, and Syntho’s own Wodda is a user of the Roland Cloud version.

Roland Cloud TR-909 alternatives?
D16’s Drumazon 2 is slightly cheaper alternative (€119), with more built in processing like per-channel EQ, a distortion module, reverb, delay and a limiter to make the dry 909 production-ready. If you’re on a budget and looking for hardware, the Behringer RD-9 is a fantastic recreation for £237 (but it is pretty massive).

Price: Lifetime Key typically ~£140. Also included in Roland Cloud memberships.

See the Roland Cloud TR-909 in action in the Syntho tutorial Drum Grooves That Move (3m46s).

Meat Beats Vinyl House Drums

What is Vinyl House Drums?
Vinyl House Drums is a lightweight VST/AU drum instrument with 70 vinyl-sourced house kits, consistent pad mapping for quickly auditioning different kits, and built-in vinyl crackle and hiss. Its retro sound makes it one of the best drum VST picks for authentic ’90s-style house grooves. It also comes with 70 MIDI patterns and all samples provided as WAV files in a standalone pack. 

What is Vinyl House Drums good for?
It’s perfect for making ’90s-leaning house grooves with instant “record” texture. Great when you want believable vinyl character and multi-out routing to process hits individually in your DAW. The “swell” control also adds a sidechain-like pumping effect to other drums, triggered by the kick. Users love its authentic retro sound.

What are the downsides of Vinyl House Drums?
Fixed kit architecture and sample-based tone. It’s much less surgical than a synth like Kick 3. You’ll need to rely on external processing for deeper sculpting.

Which artists use Vinyl House Drums?
It’s used by DJ and label boss Sidney Charles, and DJ/producer ZYNK.

Price: $30+ (pay-what-you-want)

See how Sidney Charles uses Vinyl House Drums in his Syntho tutorial on Drums & Hardware (16m20s)

Korg ELECTRIBE-R plugin

What is the ELECTRIBE-R plugin?
A software revival of the first-gen ELECTRIBE-R groovebox, a modern classic from 1999. It has four synth parts and PCM hats / cymbals / clap / snare, 15 FX and expanded motion sequencing. With 352 built-in patterns across various genres, and MIDI out/drag-&-drop workflow, it’s one of the best drum VST options for retro-sounding, pattern-based beat creation.

What is the ELECTRIBE-R good for?
Because it’s packed with pre-programmed grooves, ELECTRIBE-R will go anywhere you might normally drop a drum loop. However, with patterns being editable, it makes for an even more powerful tool. Great if your track needs momentum without resorting to pre-made loops. Also well suited to sketching minimal, garage and more. If you want the ELECTRIBE-R sound in your DAW without having to keep the hardware on your desk, this plugin is a faithful tribute 

What are the downsides of ELECTRIBE-R?
Again, the tone is retro-flavoured. If you want hyper-modern, ultra-clean drums, you’ll still layer with samples/synths. Pattern-first workflow may feel prescriptive to purists.

Which artists use ELECTRIBE-R?
Featured on Syntho by Mad.Again, demonstrating Electribe-style drum sequencing to enhance grooves. The original has fans as diverse as The Chemical Brothers and Gene Belcher from Bob’s Burgers.

ELECTRIBE-R alternatives?
If you’d prefer a real piece of electronic music, you can usually buy the original hardware on eBay or Reverb for under £200, and it’s a lot of fun.

Price: £145 (individual plugin), often discounted during Korg promos. Included in KORG Collection bundles.

Check out how Mad.Again creates a ’90s-inspired track using ELECTRIBE-R (15m45s)

SINEE Chop Suey

What is Chop Suey?
Similar to Kick 3, Chop Suey is another kick designer. And while it offers fewer features – no sub resynthesis – it does have an excellent interface. The principle is fundamentally different to Kick 3. Instead of separating kicks into different simultaneously playing layers, Chop Suey separates each section over time into transient, body, and tail, all with precise controls.

What is Chop Suey good for?
When you want the click from one kick but the body from another, Chop Suey lets you build hybrids fast. It can make unique kicks in any genre, but it’s specifically great for kicks with longer tails common in techno and muscular deep tech. Chop Suey has a simple design, with controls for cutoff, pitch, resonance, saturation and more. One of its cleverest tricks is how it phase aligns samples to avoid weak or weird-sounding kicks when combining samples. In short, its smart workflow earns it a place among the best drum VST tools for deep tech and techno kicks.

What are the downsides of Chop Suey?
It’s kick-only and sample-dependent. You’ll still need tools for the rest of the kit and external FX for character beyond its onboard shaping.

Price: €39

Digital Sound Factory E-MU Mo’ Phatt (Kontakt)

What is E-MU Mo’ Phatt?
This one’s a bit of a curveball, but incredible if you want to authentically capture the ’90s aesthetic. The original Mo’ Phatt was a bright purple hardware sound module (succeeding 1997’s equally purple Planet Phatt). It was billed as an “urban dance synth”, and had sounds ranging from old-school hip hop drums to organs, horns and synth sounds. Since then, a Kontakt library has been developed capturing E-MU’s Mo’ Phatt/Proteus-era ROMpler tones – drum kits, percussion, synths, stabs – ported from the hardware for authentic late-’90s/early-’00s flavour. 

What is E-MU Mo‘ Phatt good for?
Injecting ’90s urban/house colour and crunchy ROMpler drum hits into minimal/tech house. Great for throwback claps, toms and percussive one-shots that feel era-correct. It really nails the vintage textures that samples alone don’t always.

What are the downsides of Mo’ Phatt?
Requires Kontakt. It’s sample-based and skews vintage, making it less flexible than a full drum synth for modern sound design. 

Which artists use Mo’ Phatt?
Mo’ Phatt is historically linked to ’90s/’00s hip-hop (DJ Premier) and dance producers including Roni Size, ATB and Basement Jaxx. The library is the official DSF recreation of that sound set. 

Mo’ Phatt (Kontakt) alternatives?
If you can stomach the colour scheme in your studio, the original Mo’ Phatt 19-inch rack hardware is pretty easy to find for £180.

Price: $99.95 (as part of Proteus Rack Library) 

Learn how Wodda uses the Mo’ Phatt in the video Drum Grooves That Move (14m29s)

Special Mentions

While these aren’t the best drum VST picks in the strictest sense, these are essential drum tools:

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