Chaos Tones has released Deviant Drums FREE II, a free acoustic drum instrument for Kontakt Player 8.1 and up.
It’s the sequel to the Deviant Drums FREE Edition we covered last July, and it builds on the same concept. You get one kit pulled from the paid version, served in a 2GB download.
The thing I liked about the original free version was how much tweaking it let you do inside Kontakt Player, and that’s still the main selling point here.
You get the virtual drum mixer with volume, pan, EQ, and other channel settings, so you can shape the kit the way you’d shape a real studio session without leaving the instrument. This kind of depth in a free Kontakt Player library is still rare, and it’s the main reason I like this one so much.
What’s new in this version starts with the snare. Chaos Tones swapped in a totally different snare sample that sounds deeper, fatter, and more muted than the one in the previous free release. If the earlier snare wasn’t your cup of tea, this is a fresh shot at the kit.
Hi-hat response has been improved, and the hi-hats now support CC control for Alesis and Yamaha e-drum setups.
V-drum cymbal chokes now work via aftertouch, which is handy if you’re playing the kit from an electronic kit rather than a keyboard. Chaos Tones also added more mapping selections and new presets.
On the limitations side, the free version still gives you a single drum kit with one snare, five presets, and a pared-down effects and routing setup compared to the full version.
You also don’t get the drum loop MIDI pack that ships with the paid edition (112 grooves, 68 fills, 81 fragments, 49 breaks, in 4/4 and triplet). What you do get is the full drum mapping, which keeps the workflow consistent if you later move up to the paid version.
I already own a ridiculous number of acoustic drum libraries, but freebies like this one are hard to pass up, especially when they run in the free Kontakt Player rather than requiring the full Kontakt. It’s good for jamming on a MIDI keyboard and legitimately usable in production if you put in a bit of work with the mixer.
Deviant Drums FREE II runs in Kontakt Player 8.1 on macOS 13+ and Windows 10 or 11, with VST3, AU, and AAX support. You’ll need Native Access to install it.
Download: Deviant Drums FREE II (FREE)
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Last Updated on April 28, 2026 by Tomislav Zlatic.
