A major chunk of hip-hop music nowadays is produced with the help of digital plugins rather than using any real hardware instruments such as drums, keyboard or bass guitar. If you are a hip hop producer looking to create sick beats we have scoured the best VST for hip hop that will take your mixes to the next level.
Right from the mixing stage to mastering, these VST plugins will make your hip hop tracks sound professional and neat with a great amount of samples, drums, bass and vocal melodies thrown in for a good measure. Some of the biggest names in hip-hop such as Eminem, Drake, Jay Z and Kanye West use most of the plugins on our list of the best VST for hip hop. So, without further ado, let’s dive right in.
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5+ Best VST for Hip Hop Music 2024
1) Addictive Drums
Addictive Drums is a massive repository of MIDI beats, one-shots, and eclectic drum kits that will take care of your rhythmic inspiration for creating slick hip hop beats.
This industry standard beatmaker also offers tons of new percussive elements for a compact hip hop sound.
Although the drum kits span several genres, and not just hip-hop, you do have a good opportunity to make your drum beats sound unique and refreshing in a genre that is now full of songs with cookie cutter triplet beats.
Not to mention, you can further sculpt your drum tracks with individual customizations for snares, kick drums, mic volumes, and even add delay, reverb and many distortions for percussion instruments such as cymbals, and hi-hats.
2) XLN RC-20
Looking for a lo-fi hip hop sound? XLN RC-20 is one of the best VST for hip hop that can add the warm lo-fi textures popular in vintage hip hop songs of the 1990s and even late 80s.
The XLN RC-20 can add the right amount of saturation, dirt and grit to your tracks.
For starters, it hosts 6 FX modules (for replicating the nostalgic vinyl VHS sounds) and effects such as Reverb, Wobble & Flutter, Noise Generator, Distortion and Saturation and Bitcrusher to fine tune the subtleties of your new mix.
3) Izotope Ozone 11
A staple plugin used while mastering, Izotope’s Ozone is a comprehensive suite comprising solid mastering tools. Ozone 11 has all the bells and whistles and processors to create professional-quality master tracks.
We are talking about a melange of exciting effects and tools that run the gamut from Imager, Maximizer, EQ, Master Rebalance, Dynamic EQ, to Spectral Shaper, Reference Match, and Exciter.
What’s more, you can customize the mastering chain to apply Ozone 11’s effects in a modular fashion to suit a particular hip hop track’s demand.
4) Sektor
With over 750 presets and 200 unique wavetables, Sektor is a hybrid wavetable synth that you must have in your VST arsenal.
A perfect accompaniment for sound designing, you can harness evocative and deep experimental synth sounds to spruce up your hip hop tunes.
Boasting an impressive synthesis engine, Sektor features ADSR, modulation envelopes, LFOs, up to 16 voices per oscillator, and a massive filter bank that can help produce great sounds from pads to leads and bass.
5) Izotope Neutron
Rounding up our list of best VST for hip hop is another solid offering by Izotope called Neutron 4. It is a nifty channel strip plugin that features the legendary “Trash” distortion effect plugin (which was available as a solo plugin not so long ago).
Neutron 4’s Trash module can spruce up the dynamics of your track and make it sound more aggressive.
Neutron 4 comes in handy especially when you want to sculpt saturation in your bass or drum tracks via its gigantic library of saturation, distortion, and bit crusher algorithms and convolution reverbs.
SEE ALSO: Best VST Plugins for Producing EDM