Our handy price widgets also display the latest and best prices from our trusted retailers. We've listed our choice drum machines in price order to make it easier for you to find the right one for your budget. If you'd rather find out which we think are the best drum machine picks, keep scrolling down! Here you can read about the main features you should consider when buying a drum machine.

If you want to learn a little more about buying a drum machine before you decide which one is for you, click the 'buying advice' link above. We are also not covering drum machines which are more at the synth end of production like Moog's DFAM and Soma Laboratory's Pulsar-23. While they do beats, their focus is more as hardware DAWs for complete song production. We are not including bigger music production workstations like the Native Instruments Maschine+, Polyend Tracker, Roland Verselab MV-1 and Akai MPC Live II. We're including no less than 15 current models in our round up and there are plenty of new machines set to hit the market including Behringer's long-awaited RD-9, Korg’s Drumlogue, Modor’s DR-2 and Koka’s Pocket Beatbox, a portable multisampling drum machine that looks very interesting indeed.

You can get a measure of just how popular the drum machine market is by how many new machines are available or set to be released over coming months. They come in all shapes and sizes: from cheaper beat makers that provide great, workhorse sounds for many genres, right up to full-blown grooveboxes that will add bass and lead synth and sample parts to those beats.

Each one of the best drum machines in our round-up works as a standalone unit without the need for any other gear. Drum machines are therefore in demand for everything from live performances to adding that elusive analogue clout to a computer-based mix.

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