Top 7 Free sample packs for Music production

Do you spend a lot of time searching for the best sample pack? Are you on a budget?

 

 

You don’t have to buy expensive royalty-free sample packs for making good music, when there are plenty available for free download on the internet.

 

 

Today with Top Music Arts we are going to help you by making the searching process a little easier. We’ve collected 7 of our favorite free sample packs from across the web.

Whether you’re using a hardware MPC sampler or you just want to play around with Ableton Live’s Simpler or Drum Rack instruments, or Kontakt libraries, there’s enough variety in the packs below to make hip-hop, techno, house, ambient, experimental club music and more!

 

Whether you agree with the ethics of sampling or not, modern electronic music was largely built on that practice. Digging for old records and finding the perfect loop to cut, pitch and stretch is still one of the best ways to find inspiration, but there’s no shame in using an official, royalty-free sample pack to make music.

Licensed packs can be purchased from stores such as Beatport, Juno, rrupt, Sample Magic and Loopmasters, but it’s very possible to find great, royalty-free sample collections for no money across the internet. 

 

No one can resist a good freebie sample pack, here are 7 of them:

 

1. Mega Drum Machines Collection

This giant sample pack contains all the beats from a staggering 150 drum machines, from the famous (Roland’s TR-808, Korg’s Minipops) to the not so well known (Cheetah’s SpecDrum, BME’s Rattlesnake and Sakata’s DPM48). It’s mapped for NI’s Kontakt, but if you don’t have that you can just take the individual sample files and use them however you like.

If you are a fan of using drum machine´s sounds as we are, here you will have plenty to have fun with!

Each module has a lot of features to control settings of every sound, and they have plenty of drum machines for you to pick.

This is a Kontakt library and requires Kontakt 5.6.5 or newer versions but, Full (won't work in Kontakt Player). 
The library contains samples of about 150 old, vintage, obscure, rare and hard to find drum machines.

What Mega Drum Machines Collection has to offer:

• Each kit has been mapped in a General Midi format (more or less, many old drum machines only have 4-5 sounds)
• Each kit has been divided into 5 groups: Kicks, Snares, Hats, Cymbals and Toms
• Each Group has custom controls for tuning, panning and volume
• Each kit has custom graphics

You can download it from the sample pack´s page:

https://www.autodafe.net/samples/kontakt-libraries/mega-drum-machines-collection-for-kontakt.html

This collection is free but if you want to consider a small donation, you can do it in the same link.

And here is the update with some new features, we suggest you get both downloaded.

https://www.autodafe.net/free-stuff/mega-drum-machines-collection-v-2-for-kontakt.html

 

 

 2. Irrupt´s Jam Sandwich Vol. 1

 

If you just need a basic, meat and potatoes sample pack for making big room dance tracks, this free collection from online store Irrupt has all you need. You get:

• 33 bassline loops,
• 60 rolling melodic loops
• 51 killer drum loops and fills to get you jamming right away.

 

If you prefer to build your beats from the ground up, there´s:

 

• 46 drum one-shots.
• 17 kick loops and 37 percussive loops.
• 28 snare, clap and rimshot loops.
• 42 top, ride and hi-hat loops.
• 42 radical effect and drone loops.
• 22 delightfully catchy, and downright bizarre, vocal hooks.

 

This pack features, BPMS from 80 to 170, Audio quality of 24 Bits - 44.1 kHz Per Sample, BPM and Key Labeled. With A total size of 941.1MB.

It is one of the largest sized sample pack of this list, but you will find it very versatile. That´s why we included it.

 

You can download it here:

 

https://www.irrupt.com/jam-sandwich-vol1

 

 

 3. Sample-Radar Ad lib Vocal Samples

 

SampleRadar’s exhaustive collection of free samples is basically a database of those sounds you’d get on music production magazine cover CDs. This one gives you a relative rarity in the world of free samples, a collection of royalty-free vocals to chop and pitch how you want.

We recommend you to use all the fx you want on them, like reverse delay, flanger, and all sorts of them. So that way you will end up making your beats distinct and get a more human feel to them.

With three folders: Ad libs, FX and Words. All the files BPM and Key Labeled. With a total size of 237MB.

 

You can download it here:

 

https://www.musicradar.com/news/tech/sampleradar-327-free-vocal-ad-lib-samples-564055

 

 

 

4. SampleRadar´s free Jazz Club Samples

 

As we know, producers from all over the world have been sampling old jazz records since the MPC was invented. If you don´t know how to play an instrument, or maybe you just need a new phrase to add a new section in your song, this SampleRadar pack will get you everything you need. It’s got live bass, electric piano and dusty drums that will work in deep house, hip-hop beats and more!

The samples are supplied in four construction kits, each and every one of them is tempo and key labelled. Inside the main folder for each of these you'll find:

•  Drums
•  Guitar
•  Bass
•  Keys

You can play with them, cut, chop, or transpose them, maybe even use a sample as a starting point for your song, and pitch them to combine them to match tonalities, or just use them as main harmony for your tracks.

 

This sample pack has a lot to offer when it comes to harmony!

 

They are all 24bit wav files, with a total size of 460MB.

 

You can download it here:

 

https://www.musicradar.com/news/tech/sampleradar-466-free-jazz-club-samples-291818

 

 

 5. Philarmonia Orchestral Samples

 

Mostly Orchestral samples are very expensive to buy, but the UK’s highly regarded Philharmonia Orchestra has a gigantic royalty-free database for download at its website. It’s not just string sections either – it covers everything from the French horn to the Thai gong. With different tonalities, so you can work with any song. Each instrument can be manipulated properly as you wish. They are small sized files and are compatible to mac and windows aswell.

We suggest you download all the instrument samples because, you never know when you could need some new sounds!

You can download all the instruments together at once by clicking here:

 

Or download each one separately, for getting only the instruments you like the most, by clicking this dropdown menu here:

You can download them here:

 

http://www.philharmonia.co.uk/explore/sound_samples

 

 

6. Filter Dread Sample Pack

Filter Dread’s hybrid of jungle, rave, grime and ambient music has made him one of the UK underground’s most unpredictable artists. This pack gives you all the oddball drums, synths and zapping effects to to make your own zoned-out bangers. He celebrated Christmas of 2014 by giving away a free sample pack, with some free bonus tracks thrown in for good measure.

It is a very handy sample pack for additions to your beats, fx layers to your drums, builds, drops, new sections, this filtered pack is very handy to use as a transition part in your track.

It has small sized files but it takes a bit to download because it has A LOT of them, so it´s worth the waiting!

 

You can download them here:

 

https://www.sendspace.com/file/kvoe3n

 

 

 

7. Guitar and Cassette: a love story

 

This sample pack has been recorded everything directly on a Tascam 488 mk1 using all the power of its pre-amp and tape goodness. The free version of this pack contains every sample recorded on C. So, have in mind you can transpose it to any note you want so it blends into your other samples. You also should think about the tonality of your song to do it faster and effective.

 

To download the free one, just click on the drop-down menu under the photo and select the free version, put 0 as the price and download it. You can also get the full pack with more tonalities and notes for an inexpensive amount in the same link, but with the free one, you will have more than enough to get you going.

 

You can download it here:

 

https://gumroad.com/l/nQiJo

 

 

 

 

They are all very useful packs in their own way, and with all of the 7 sample packs we just gave you here you should have all you need to start making some new good music.

And all for free, so you have no excuse!

Keep in mind your libraries, sample packs, construction kits, drum kits, or any type of samples should be all on the same folder, so after you download them we suggest you move them all to the same location in your disk so you can have them all working with no problems.  You can separate the folders in different types like, Kontakt libraries, Ableton packs, Sample packs, etcetera.

To keep things organized, because when you start in the path of downloading samples, it can get real messy and you could end up having A LOT of samples you don´t use, hoarding space. And no one enjoys a full or nearly full drive!

So if you found them useful or you have any doubt you can comment below

We would like to know, which samples do you like the most?