My son and I both play drums so we have a couple of drumkits around, since I also do a fair bit of drum programming and sequencing for song demos I decided to set up some good mics and record/sample our kits so I could program stuff with our own drum sounds. The two kits are quite different so it gave a nice variety of kit pieces to sample. Additionally while I was at it it I grabbed a bunch of hand percussion stuff we had laying around and sampled it too. The dealio with these kits are they have 5 velocity layers per kit piece and have a very small memory footprint so they are ideal for using with DAWs or Sequencers on computers new and old. They are provided here free for download in 4 formats: ‘h2drumkit’ for Hydrogen Drum Machine, ‘SFZ’ which is an open cross-platform sound library format supported in applications like LinuxSampler and Sforzando and also in the popular Soundfont2 format. Recent developments by Robin Gareus have also expanded the AVL Drumkits into an LV2 Audio Plugin as well. If you are simply looking for drum samples to load in a sampler the zipped SFZ folders also contain all the individual samples. Below are some download links and also some demos to listen to.

LICENSING:

AVL Drumkits are free to download and use and are licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0

DOWNLOADS:

Hydrogen Kits FTP

AVL Drumkits SFZ

AVL Percussion Kit SFZ

AVL Drumkits Soundfont2

AVL Drumkits LV2 Plugin

There are also PDF Keymap and Midnam files (to show kit piece note names in the MIDI Editors of DAW’s like Ardour and Mixbus) if desired…

Here is an excellent tutorial by Conor at libremusicproduction.com on using the Soundfont2 versions in Ardour 5.4+:

Video of the ‘Red Zeppelin’ SFZ:

Video of the new AVL Drumkits LV2 Plugin: