Steinbach Instruments is a three-person project from Hamburg. We record, we listen, we build: together we turn endangered instruments into software, carefully, one instrument at a time.
Hauke is a freelance artist, writer and audio engineer. He records the instruments on location, from placing the microphones in a village church to editing every single sample, and shapes the sound of each library until it plays like the original.
He also runs a mixing and mastering studio in Hamburg, which is where the obsession with honest, unpolished sound comes from.
Kai is a touring musician and works in experimental sound engineering. His field is microphone technique and vintage analogue equipment: tape machines and tube-powered gear, the kind of signal path that leaves a mark on everything passing through it.
A fondness for old and sometimes unusual instruments keeps him searching for new sounds and sonic worlds, which is exactly what this archive is made of.
Jakob is a 3D artist with a focus on hard-surface modeling and product renderings. For the archive, he rebuilds each instrument completely in 3D, down to the last stop knob, and creates the renderings you see across this site.
From the same model, he then builds the working plugin interface: bringing every detail to life so that playing the plugin feels like standing right in front of the original.
Every instrument in our archive is real: a single, specific piece of craftsmanship with its own history and its own flaws. We sample them so their voices remain playable long after the mechanics give out.
Explore the collection