Handy Drums: JAZZ STANDARD v2

Give yourself more time to focus on creative parts of your song instead of spending loads of time finding or making a usable drum sound. Achieving great-sounding, studio-quality jazz drums takes a significant amount of time, even when you are highly skilled for the task and have the best tools at your disposal.

We have decades of experience recording drums and invested significant time painstakingly editing and carefully mixing them from multi-track recordings so you don’t have to.

This jazz drum VST comes pre-mixed and ready to drop into your projects, making it the ideal choice for anyone seeking studio-quality jazz drum samples or a reliable jazz drum sample pack.

It’s simple, effective, and designed to let you focus on your creativity while ensuring your tracks resonate with authentic jazz tones.

Every kit and percussion setup has a very balanced sound–not too hyped and not too dry.
– RECORDING MAGAZINE

Brilliantly recorded, mix-ready kits.
– COMPUTER MUSIC

Without exception, the kits sound really good; this is mix‑ready stuff with a minimum of fuss.
– SOUND ON SOUND

To achieve larger-than-life yet completely natural-sounding drums, every step of the recording process is critical. Starting with drum selection, tuning, placement and much more, all drums were carefully treated before even a single note was sampled.

Our acoustic jazz drum samples are recorded with premium microphones, preamps, and converters, preserving every nuance of sound. Whether you’re after acoustic jazz drum samples, jazz drums samples, or a complete jazz drum kit sample, Handy Drums Jazz Standard delivers unmatched sound quality.

Handy Drums JAZZ STANDARD is self-contained and comes with multiple powerful samplers built-in. You don’t need to spend extra money or effort buying 3rd party samplers and worrying about how to connect it all. Load Handy Drums like any standard VST/AU/AAX plugin or a stand-alone app.

Be up and running in mere minutes.

Sound so natural; you can almost touch them.

Handy Drums Jazz Standard sounds like an actual drum kit being played right in front of you in a room instead of a bunch of individual components sounding in their own isolated spaces. 

We achieved realism by recording the full depth of acoustic drums and their natural ambiance, then meticulously editing and blending them in the post-production.

The sound is very much like you are listening to the drums within a beautifully treated, compact studio room.
– SOUND ON SOUND

Jazz Standard conforms to GM drum mapping wherever possible. Drop in any standard midi drum loop onto your DAW timeline to hear immediate results.

It’s equally easy to Map Handy Drums Jazz Standard just the way you like, quickly and effortlessly and then use the Preset Manager to save your mapping for future use.

Select a note for any available instrument, or start with a blank slate and use our “strike-to-learn-note” mapping to assign any key on your MIDI controller to an instrument.

NEW IN V2.0: Take advantage of the additional “blank” mapping to assign several keys to a single instrument sound, which is great for keyboardists looking to play drum rolls.

Read more about drum mapping in Handy Drums.

An acoustic hi-hat is a complex instrument in its own right. One of the most awesome features of Handy Drums is the variable hi-hats. It utilises full range of sampled hats from tightly closed to closed, 25% open, 50% open, 75% open, and 100% open, for both tip and edge sounds. 

Despite these 12 types of articulations, 10 dynamic ranges, and numerous round robins, you can seamlessly switch from one to another using only TWO notes and a CC4 controller.

We made major improvements to our variable hats in v2.0 so they play, feel, and sound as close to the real thing as possible.

NEW IN V2.0: Play variable hats with any regular GM drum loop.

NEW IN V2.0: For e-drummers, play variable hats with either dual-zone or single-zone pad, as long as your foot controller sends CC4 messages. Play hat foot splashes as you would on an acoustic kit.

This approach streamlines something that was previously more of a time sink of assigning notes to each articulation.
– COMPUTER MUSIC

…the hi‑hat mapping is nicely done, providing plenty of control over the degree of closed/open status of the cymbals.
– SOUND ON SOUND

Find out more about our variable hats.

While we initially focused on non-drummers when creating Handy Drums, much of our focus for v2.0 has been dedicated to features relevant to drummers playing electronic kits.

With a simple switch, Handy Drums will be specifically tailored to e-drummers:

• The snare drum is split into head-on D1 and rimshot on E1
• You can trigger hi-hat foot splashes in the same way you would on an acoustic kit
• You can use either a dual-zone or single-zone hi-hat pad to play the variable hats as long as your hat foot controller sends CC4 messages.
• Our variable hats respond like the real thing with natural hi-hat chokes, producing different sounds depending on whether you close the pedal slowly or quickly.
• Choose between a dual zone (default) ride cymbal pad or a single zone pad to play both bow and bell sounds separated by velocity threshold.

Learn more about the e-drummer mode.

Save and recall the entire plugin’s state at any point by using the Preset Manager.

This is particularly handy for creating custom drum maps.

Learn more about the preset manager.

Use them as they are or as a starting point for your own grooves.

Pair Handy Drums JAZZ STANDARD with Handy Grooves JAZZ DRUMS, our MIDI drum loop package for instant results. Or, combine one of the other MIDI drum loops from the Handy Grooves range.

All of our midi drum loops have been produced with the utmost care by world-class drummer producers and tailored to work specifically with Handy Drums plugins.

Handy Drums and Handy Grooves is a perfect pairing for the singer-songwriter, musician, or producer who wants to get a professional-sounding drum track up and grooving.
– RECORDING MAGAZINE

The grooves are very usable, the MIDI obviously editable, and the price pretty modest given what’s on offer.
– SOUND ON SOUND

The mixer takes center stage in Handy Drums and gives you immediate access to essential controls.

Quickly preview included components to make sure everything is in working order using the audition buttons on top of each instrument group.

NEW in V2.0:

View mute, solo, and panning states of all channels at a glance. Unmute and un-solo all channels at once.

Pan instruments, swap left and right channels, or turn them mono with a simple switch.

Additional popup mixers give you access to individual components of complex instruments, such as hi-hats.

Get all the details on the mixer here.

Up to 12 samples per dynamic level

Every drum stroke played by a real drummer is ever so slightly different from the previous one, no matter how good the drummer is. This is part of what gives it that “human” feel and is why our ears can instantly hear the difference between a roll played by a real drummer and the same sample being triggered over again.

To make our Jazz Standard sound more like a real jazz drummer, each drum and cymbal has been sampled numerous times at every dynamic level. No sample is repeated sequentially during playback, but a different one is triggered. Depending on the instrument, some internal samplers will play the available samples at random, while others will be played in a “round robin” fashion.

Every instrument has a round/random robin independent from other instruments.

This culminates in the impression of a drummer hitting each drum with minor variations each time. Something many other ‘realistic’ VIs never quite nail.
– COMPUTER MUSIC

Assign any MIDI CC controller to a number of relevant controls on Handy Drums, such as volume faders, panners, mute buttons, and more.

It is as simple as right-clicking, selecting “Learn MIDI CC,” and then moving a fader or a knob on your hardware MIDI controller for instant pairing. Save your settings in the Preset Manager for future use.

Learn more about the assign/ learn MIDI CC functionality.

Handy Drums have an exceptionally small CPU and memory footprint. Because we have gotten away from unnecessary effects, your computer will run them without breaking a sweat.

Go ahead and load several Handy Drums plugins with no problem.