Top 5 Friday | Best Drum & Bass VST Plugins

Top Five Friday - Best Drum & Bass VST Plugins

Sure, technology is important in all forms of music, but in the super-tight DnB community, the need for a great drum and bass plugin is huge, with almost as many opinions on what’s the best drum and bass plugin as there are producers. So what are the best VSTs for drum and bass, really – and what’s the best drum and bass VST that you can get yourself on Plugin Boutique? In this rundown of DnB VST plugins, we’ll let you know the answers.

5. UAJM Beatmaker VOID

Totally dedicated to bass music, this plugin helps you create beats in DnB, Dance Hall, Dubstep, Garage, 2-step and Future Bass styles with just a few clicks. Controlled with MIDI, once you’ve chosen your kit and mix type, the bottom part of your keyboard activates particular drums and cymbals, while the upper part triggers whole patterns, using Intros, Fills, Endings and Breakdowns, Verses, Choruses and Specials.

Each kit element also has control over things like level, decay, pitch and filtering. There’s a Master section with Sweep, Saturate, Maximize and Ambience controls, too.

One of the best things about Beatmaker Void is that you can drag individual drum patterns from the keyboard to your DAW as MIDI files to tweak a little further, too.

4. iZotope Neutron 3

This huge plugin is an entire mixing package, offering a Sculptor, EQ, two compressors, a multiband gate, and a multiband exciter. You can combine these elements into a processing strip of your choice, and even get all your settings together using the artificial intelligence assistant.

Each one of Neutron’s processors is insanely powerful on its own, with features like Dynamic bands and masking detection in the EQ, multiband gating in the Gate, Vintage and Modern compression modes in the compressors, and multiband exciter flavours. You can run these individually if you’ve got the Advanced version of Neutron.

Neutron is also packed with many more features, such as Tonal Balance Control and Visual Mixer plugins, and more AI technology that helps you get starting points for your mix levels.

3. Xfer Records Serum

It’s the synth that needs no introduction. Serum has been topping the charts for years now, and those high-quality, loud but musical tones make it a massive hit for DnB producers the world over.

Two wavetable oscillators generate the sound, and you can scan, skew and mess with the waveforms here to modify your source. Next, filtering, up to eight LFOs, envelopes, macros, and a separate tab full of effects to drench any patch in. 

There’s not much that we can say about Serum that hasn’t already been said; but if you’ve got $189 to spend on software, grab it now.

2. Inphonik RX950

What can a digital-analogue converter emulation really do for your music? When it’s specifically built to mimic the conversion processes of the Akai S950, it turns out, quite a lot.

There may only be four controls, but it’s the conversion quality that counts. You can have an effect on the exact depth and type of the processing by adjusting the Input control to introduce more distortion, the Audio Bandwidth control to set your sample rate and introduce S950-style aliasing; low-pass Filter your audio, and push up the highs with the Brilliance control. This one’s a must-have for some authentic old-school digital sounds.

1. AudioThing Reels

This tape emulator is a dab hand at making digital sources sound a lot more like real analogue recordings, with plenty of settings to determine exactly how your virtual tape will perform – Tape Type, Tape Speed, Ducking, Harshness, Wow and Flutter, Crosstalk, Hiss and Motor. 

Then there’s an entire Echo module that you can use to introduce some vintage tape-style delay, with control over the Time, Feedback, Lowpass cutoff and delay Level. Elsewhere, there’s limiting, mono output, and more.