Steinbach Instruments is a two-person project from Hamburg. One of us records, one of us builds: together we turn endangered instruments into software, carefully, one instrument at a time.
Hauke is an 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.
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: when you pull a stop or flip a tab in one of our instruments, you are touching the same geometry the camera sees.
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