9 Free Drum Kits: 141 Royalty-Free Samples to Download

Every free drum kit download seems to cost something that isn't money: your email, a newsletter subscription, a "free" account on a sample site that mails you forever. Ours cost nothing at all, on purpose. ClipCraft's free sample packs are the complete drum library from our SoundCraft browser DAW, packaged into nine zip downloads: 141 WAV one-shots in total, 9.8 MB for the whole collection, royalty-free for commercial and non-commercial use, with no login and no email field anywhere on the page.

What's in the nine packs

• The Complete Collection: all 141 one-shots in a single 9.8 MB zip, if you'd rather skip the à la carte below.
• 808s (17): deep subs, knocking mids and distorted tails, with names that tell you what you're getting; Godzilla, Warhead, Poltergeist, Jelly Wobble.
• Kicks (21) and snares (24): the meat-and-potatoes packs, punchy to boxy.
• Hi-hats (15) and claps (12): closed ticks, opens, and stacked hands.
• Cymbals (21) and toms (19): crashes, rides and full-shell hits.
• Percussion & FX (12): the impact-and-foley drawer for transitions and accents.

You can hear every sample before downloading

Each pack page lists every sample with a click-to-play button, which sounds like a small thing until you remember the standard experience: download a mystery zip, discover it's 300 near-identical rimshots, delete it. Here you audition the exact seventeen 808s, decide they fit, and then take the file. The pages load fast enough to browse all nine packs in a couple of minutes, and the grid below the featured kit covers each drum type separately so you only grab what your library is missing.

Where these sounds come from

These are the same one-shots that ship inside SoundCraft's Drum Kit instrument, the pads our browser DAW users play every day. Packaging the library as zips just means the sounds work everywhere else too: they're plain WAV one-shots, so they drop into FL Studio, Ableton, Logic, GarageBand, an MPC, a hardware sampler, anything that eats WAV files. If you landed here from our GarageBand-for-Windows guide, this is the loops-and-sounds half of that answer.

Using them well

The 808s are one-shots rather than loops, which is the right call for bass: pitch them to your song's key in any sampler and slide between notes however your genre likes. In SoundCraft specifically, the library is already loaded into the Drum Kit pads, and anything you generate or edit yourself can live alongside it in the My samples section of the browser, saved to your account. Our beat-making walkthrough builds a full groove from these exact sounds, and a free account is all it takes to follow along with the same kit.

The license, plainly

Royalty-free, commercial and non-commercial use, no attribution asked. Put them in songs you sell, videos you monetize, client work, whatever; the one thing you can't do is repackage the packs themselves and sell them as a sample library, because that's not using drums, that's reselling ours. Beyond that, make things.

Free means free here: no gate, no trial, no newsletter. Grab the kit, make a beat tonight, and if the browser DAW that these sounds came from looks interesting, the account is free too.