It’s December 2023 and I’m updating this article as there are loads more great free samples packs and drum kits for Ableton. A lot of them are also now bundled with Live.
Best Free Ableton Packs
Here’s some excellent Ableton Packs I use myself. There are a ton of great resources out there for Ableton, from rack and sample bundles to crazy Max for Live tools. I’ve organised these into 2 sections…. general packs (under Best Free Ableton Packs) and percussion based (under Best Free Drum Ableton Packs).
See also: Best Free Drum Machine Samples, our Drum Pattern Guides, Studio Brootle 909 Sample Pack and all our other Sample Packs.
Here’s a rundown of the Best Free Ableton Packs:
- Creative Extensions by Ableton
- Granulator II by Robert Henke
- TAPE by Elphnt
- Legowelt’s Tape Saturation
- Hainbach’s Isolation Instruments
- The Studio Brootle Packs
- The Forge
- Stray Cats Collection
- Krikor Kouchian: Free LinnDrums for Live
- DM-307A: Free Pack
- Breakbeats by KutMasta Kurt
- Sounds Beat Selection by Sample Magic
- Break Selection by Sample Magic
- Daniel Miller’s ARP 2600 Drums
- Drum Machines by Ableton
- Designer Drums by Ableton
Full info on these follow below.
You can find our paid packs at our Shopify store, use this code for 60% off: SBCOM60STWD
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Subscribe to our email list to get a pack of kick drum samples now, and 5 new kicks each week, every week. All made in our studio. Plus other free samples from time to time…
Best Free Ableton Packs
I cover my favourite drum and percussion packs in the second half of this article, I this first section here I cover my best general free sample packs for Ableton (that are not primarily drum focused).
Creative Extensions by Ableton
Get it here.
Made by Ableton themselves in conjunction with Max For Live developer Amazing Noises. The instruments and effects it contains are great and could have been bundled with Live as proper standalone units as to be honest…
It has two instruments… ‘Bass’ – a monophonic low-end beast, and ‘Poli’ a polyphonic synth for designing lush chords that has some really nice features like ring mod and xmod (ala Jupiter-8).
It has a step sequencer called ‘Melodic Steps’ which has the ability to get mental really quickly with the ability to run different length sequences at various scales. With ability to sequence Octave, Transpose, Length, velocity and Chance (all with the ability to run at different sequence lengths for those infinitely changing modular’ sequencers).
The effects are immense… Pitch Hack (for tight pitch delay style effects), Gated Delay (beat-repeat style delay), Color Limiter (hardware mimicking limiter with saturation), Re-Enveloper (multiband envelope processor), and Spectral Blur (grainy reverb textures). Getting this pack feels like by Abelton doubled in size and I can see myself using some of these in every track we make.
Granulator II by Robert Henke (Monolake)
Get it here.
This has gained a lot of fame and rightly so, the tool is amazing for textures/drones and pads – made by the excellent Robert Henke (Monolake). It acts a bit like a sampler, but it plays back small grains of sound from a loop of the sample in an unconventional order and time. These times and orders can be tweaked to make a new evolving sound. Watch Robert explain more about it here, then download it and load up a sample….
TAPE by Elphnt
Get it here.
A great tape effect for lo-fi, flutter, and warm saturation from Elphnt.
Legowelt’s Tape Saturation
Get it here.
The mighty Legowelt has 2 tape saturation emulation effects packs. Both are great. Also check out his other packs like the Amiga 909 which is on the same link above.
Hainbach’s Isolation Instruments
Get it here.
The legendary producer, test equipment afficionado, and one of my favourite youtubers, Hainbach (‘Hi I’m Hainbach!’) has an Ableton Pack that was released with his album Isolation Instruments, which is available as part of his appearance on Brian Funk’s podcast.
The Studio Brootle Packs
Take a look at our packs here: Studio Brootle Dub Techno Chord Rack, Ableton Operator Sub Bass Rack, Techno Tom Sub Bass Ableton Rack.
The Forge
Get it here.
Some great glitchy samples and fx by IDM producer Hecq. Includes samples, construction kits, plus some custom Max for Live audio effects inducing rhythmic delays. Ideal for IDM and industrial percussion programming and processing.
Stray Cats Collection
Get it here.
Max for Cats and Sonic Bloom give away a great pack of Max For Live devices, including an 8 step sequencer, 2 instruments (with tons of presets), a chord step sequencer and some great audio effects including rhythmic and glitching delays and reverbs as well as ‘Color’ for adding analogue noise, warmth and error to the signal chain.
Best Free Ableton Drum Packs
Here’s some of the best free Ableton drum kits I’ve found. All of these are free drum kits / Ableton percussion packs that I use myself. My favourite is the on from Krikor (signed to Long Isalnd Electrical Systems (L.I.E.S.) which has effects processing racks and his own drum samples too…
Krikor Kouchian: Free LinnDrums for Live
Get it here.
Producer extraordinaire Krikor, he’s put out some dope bangers on Long Island Electrical Systems. His Linn Drum pack here is no ordinary pack – he recorded the samples on the internal memory (eproms) of a digital Casio Rz-1 drum machine, which adds some amazing down-sampling crunch to the samples. The Rack also comes with his take on Princes style drum saturation with the Purpleizer! All in all a brilliant drum tool.
We wrote about this in our Best Free Drum Machine Samples article.
DM-307A: Free Pack
Get it here.
Some raw modular drums and loops – it’s a free give away as part of a larger paid pack.
Breakbeats by KutMasta Kurt
Get it here.
Hip hop breaks from KutMasta Kurt. I love to edit and sample them in techno too.
Sounds Beat Selection
Get it here.
Drum loops from Sample Magic, spanning lots of different genres.
Break Selection
Get it here.
Live drums loops and breaks for hiphop/dnb and the likes from Sample Magic.
The Studio Brootle Drum Packs
Take a look at our packs here: Techno Kick Ableton Rack, Techno Rumble Kick Ableton Rack mk2.
Daniel Miller’s ARP 2600 Drums
Get it here.
Here’s a collection of drum racks sampled from legendary producer Daniel Miller’s semi modular dream synth. Impressive and unique percussion samples from one of my favourite synths.
Drum Machines by Ableton
Get it here.
A big pack of drums as the title suggests! It contains multiple Roland 606,707,808, 909, samples processed and programmed plus some other great samples/construction kits. Comes with a lot of ‘.alc’ file clips – you load them and the samples load with a pre-programmed beat and fx rack so there’s a loop is set up and ready to go as great starting point. This is our go-to pack for a fresh take on classic drum sounds.
Designer Drums by Ableton
Get it here.
Some really nice glitchy IDM / minimal house / glitch-hop style drum kits and samples. Plus some ‘.alc’ clip files so you can load up some pre-programmed beats with instruments and rack effects all ready to go. Perfect for digital weird drum sounds.
Summary
There you have it, some of the best free packs for your library that are highly use-sable. ‘Drum Machines’ is probably my most used pack to be honest. Please let us know anymore you recommend and we’ll update this article.
We’ve also done a rundown of the best free vsts that we use.
Before You Go…
- Get on the email list for free kick drum samples every week, plus you get all the past ones as soon as you subscribe: you can do that HERE.
- You can find our paid packs at our Shopify store HERE ( use this code for 60% off anything or everything: SBCOM60STWD ) .
- Follow us on Youtube for hardware workouts and Ableton tutorials… Studio Brootle Youtube.
- If you’re looking for 1 to 1 online Ableton lessons get in contact to get the most out of your studio time, email: studiobrootle@gmail.com.