Best Free Rock Drum Vst

[Janne Desir]

GunsN' Roses' landmark debut, Appetite for Destruction, gets much of its swagger from the tense yet swinging beats of Steven Adler, the band's energetically goofy drummer. "To Steven's credit, and unbeknownst to most, the feel and energy of Appetite was largely due to him," Slash wrote in his autobiography. "He had an inimitable style of drumming that couldn't really be replaced, an almost adolescent levity that gave the band its spark." Bassist Duff McKagan agreed: "Without his groove, we wouldn't have come up with a lot of those riffs," he told The Onion A.V. Club in 2011. Adler, who was fired from the band in 1990, was replaced by technically advanced drummers like Matt Sorum and Frank Ferrer, but no one can properly capture his exuberant, whiskey-soaked, youth-gone-wild pulse.

Meg White's idiosyncratic, primal take on drumming was fundamental to the appeal of the White Stripes, who rode their candy-colored outfits and stripped-down blues to rock stardom in the early Aughts. Tracks like "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground" and "Blue Orchid" were jolted to life by her deceptively simple backbeat bashing, which helped define the Stripes' stomp. "I would often look at her onstage and say, 'I can't believe she's up here.' I don't think she understood how important she was to the band, and to me and to music," Jack White told Rolling Stone in 2014. "She was the antithesis of a modern drummer. So childlike and incredible and inspiring. All the not-talking didn't matter, because onstage? Nothing I do will top that."

The sophisticated foundation of Swedish metal band Meshuggah's rumbling, experimental sound, Tomas Haake creates an off-kilter feel by playing a standard 4/4 beat with his right hand and tumbling polyrhythms with everything else. The result is beats that often sound like the mechanized revving of a Lamborghini Diablo SV. Since Meshuggah's first album, 1991's Contradictions Collapse, Haake has modified his approach by adding electronic beats and increasingly more sophisticated drum patterns, courtesy of guitarists Fredrik Thordendal and Mrten Hagstrm. "The guys all write on computers, and I emulate what they have written," Haake said. "This sometimes makes for awkward drumming, but at the same time it makes for a great challenge and an obstacle to overcome. It really keeps me on my toes."

Tommy Lee's gravity-defying drum solos and penchant for wearing as few clothes as possible made him one of metal's truly great showmen. But his bashing in Mtley Cre was just as important as his star power. Lee's frenetic clatter helped define the glam-punk appeal of Mtley's debut Too Fast for Love, while the earth-shaking beat that powered Dr. Feelgood's title track sounded as menacing and overwhelming as that song's tales of drug-fueled Eighties decadence. His "dream drum kit," which he took on Mtley Cre's final tour in 2015, is in line with his stripped-down aesthetic: "I have a fully see-through kit now so people can check out exactly what I'm doing," he said. "Most drummers are covered with a million drums and everyone is like, 'What are you doing back there?'"

If Ronald Shannon Jackson had done no more than play with avant-garde jazz icons Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor during a span of 12 years between 1966 and 1978, his stature would be secure. But Jackson, who incorporated parade-drumming patterns, African rhythms and funk into a singular, instantly recognizable style, went on to form his critically acclaimed Decoding Society, from which emerged Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid and Rollins Band bassist Melvin Gibbs. "He synthesized blues shuffles with African syncopations through the lens of someone who gave vent to all manner of emotions," Reid said of the late drummer-composer in a 2003 Fort Worth Weekly article. "I feel that the collision of values in his music really represents American culture." Jackson's seismic rumble also drove sessions led by John Zorn and Bill Laswell, and reached peak extremity in Last Exit, a take-no-prisoners punk-jazz quartet featuring Laswell, saxophonist Peter Brtzmann and guitarist Sonny Sharrock.

"If it never got beyond the hard-hitting things, I wouldn't have been very suitable," said Kinks drummer Mick Avory. It might be one reason the Kinks' used a session drummer on their proto-metal missile "You Really Got Me" (though Avory contributed tambourine). But as Kinks' frontman Ray Davies matured as a songwriter, Avory would emerge as one of the Sixties more quietly innovative drummers. "I don't know if Ray's writing blended into my way of playing or if I blended into the way he was writing." With his jazz-tutored versatility and witty drum cadences, Avory, who'd been courted by the Rolling Stones in 1962, was indeed the ideal rhythmic foil for Ray Davies' sardonic, mature style. While Avory's playing was refined and low-key, his onstage fights with guitarist Dave Davies were the stuff of legend; when Dave trashed Avory's drum kit to close off a 1965 Cardiff gig, he got a drum pedal launched at his head in return. Yet, somehow Avory managed not to get kicked out of the band until 1984.

A jazz-trained fixture on the London blues scene, Waller came into his own when he joined the Jeff Beck Group in 1967. His distinctive "Waller wallop" powered much of Beck's Truth, the missing link between hard blues and heavy metal. Waller also drummed on Rod Stewart's earliest solo albums, his finest moment arising from a 1971 session he showed up to sans cymbals. Rod couldn't afford to blow the studio time so he recorded "Maggie May" anyway, with Waller's bashing so fierce and steady that critic Greil Marcus quipped that he deserved the Nobel Prize in physics. "We overdubbed the cymbals later, so you hear them more faintly," Stewart recalled. "Micky forgetting to bring his cymbals actually gave 'Maggie May' a sharper beat."

When Santana took the stage on the second day of the Woodstock Festival, sandwiched between Country Joe McDonald and John Sebastian, they faced an ocean of listeners who had never heard a note of their music, since the group's debut LP had yet to hit shelves. But from the opening note of "Waiting," the audience was mesmerized by the band's unique fusion of infectious Latin rhythms and explosive psychedelic rock. Holding it all together was 20-year-old drummer Michael Shrieve, the youngest performer at the entire festival. With conga player Michael Carabello on one side and timbales player Jose "Chepito" Areas on the other, Shrieve laid down a tumbling, jazz-infused solo midway through "Soul Sacrifice" that remains absolutely stunning nearly 50 years on. Santana would shed nearly all of his original bandmates just two years later when he embraced fusion and other non-commercial styles, but Shrieve stuck by his side and even co-produced 1973's Welcome and 1974's Borboletta. The drummer went on to work with everyone from the Pat Travers Band to the Rolling Stones, showcasing his formidable range. "Michael Shrieve turned me onto Miles Davis and John Coltrane," Carlos Santana said in 2013. "He opened a whole new dimension for my heart." (Fittingly, the collaboration continues: Shrieve will appear on Santana IV, out April 15th, which reunites the majority of the lineup last heard on the group's 1971's self-titled LP.)

In under a year, Elvis Costello moved from the wiry pub-rock of My Aim Is True to the bilious punk frenzy of This Year's Model, and he couldn't have made the great lurch forward without Mitch Mitchell fan Pete Thomas behind the kit. On those earliest Attractions records, Thomas played how Elvis sang, with a pent-up-then-spurted anger, a hesitant stutter of kick or snare suggesting a failed attempt at restraining an inevitable explosion. (Cue to the thrilling intro to "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea.") As Costello's songwriting came to demand greater nuance, Thomas remained his ideal rhythmic accomplice, playing with an intuitive sense yielded by long-term collaboration. "Pete Thomas is the rock and roll drummer of his generation by some considerable distance," Costello tweeted last year, "and that you never read that in polls tells you everything you need to know about 'polls' and nothing about drummers."

Allman Brothers Band drummers Butch Trucks and Jai Johanny "Jaimoe" Johanson have been inseparable since the group's inception, powering everything from the intricate rhythms of the iconic "Whipping Post" to subtle workouts like their rendition of Muddy Waters' "Trouble No More." Jaimoe's pedigree as a Sixties soul drummer with the likes of Otis Redding meshes with Trucks' bluesy, rock-steady pulse to form a syncopated beat-logic all their own. As Jaimoe recounted to Relix, he and Trucks tried to take drum lessons from Elvin Jones in 1974, only to have the jazz legend tell them, "What do you guys want? I know who you are. What am I supposed to teach you?"

Greg Errico was all of 17 years old when Sylvester Stewart invited the San Francisco native to join his new group Sly and the Family Stone. Errico would help helm one of funk music's most important rhythm sections from their first recordings through the epochal There's a Riot Goin' On. In 2015, Errico told Rolling Stone that at their height, playing with the Family Stone "made my hair stand up, where that stage lifted off like a 747 and flew." By 1971, with the Family Stone entering into disarray, Errico was the first to peel off and ended up working with the likes of Lee Oskar, Betty Davis and Funkadelic as not just a drummer but a producer and arranger.

Nearly ubiquitous reggae drummer Lowell Fillmore Dunbar played with everyone and, due to how frequently his riddims have been sampled, is quite possibly the world's most recorded musician. Nicknamed for his devotion to Sly Stone, Dunbar recorded his first track, "Night Doctor," with the Upsetters at age 15. His 1972 introduction to bassist Robbie Shakespeare led to a life-long working relationship, notably in Peter Tosh's and Black Uhuru's bands as well as the Rolling Stones' 1978 Some Girls tour. Sly and Robbie translated dub reggae to the stage better than anyone. "Me and Robbie didn't realize what we were doing until Jamaican music went dubwise and the bass and drum would come right in your face," he explained. The distance between Carlton Barrett's relaxed swing and Dunbar's fierce metronomic playing marks the place where roots reggae evolved into its dancehall successor.

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