VST. When a Musical Instrument Became a File

In 1996 Hamburg’s Steinberg released a new version of Cubase that recorded audio straight to the hard drive, and along with it announced a standard called VST, Virtual Studio Technology. The idea was simple. An effect that people used to buy as a metal box and mount in a rack could now be a small program that the music software loads into itself like a module. In 1999, with the second version of the standard, the instrument itself could become such a module: a synthesizer, a sampler, a drum machine. Steinberg gave the specification to third-party developers for free, and within a few years there were thousands of plugins. Plugins as such already existed by then inside separate studio systems: in 1992 the company Waves was founded in Tel Aviv, and its Q10 equalizer is considered the first audio plugin sold as a product. Its L1 limiter, released in 1994, then spent years helping pop music get louder. VST opened such programs to everyone sitting at home at an ordinary computer.

The musical instrument became a file. It was downloaded, installed in ten seconds and opened in several copies at once if one was not enough. A laptop of the early 2000s held more synthesizers than a rich studio of the eighties, and they cost dozens of times less than the hardware. Berlin’s Native Instruments, founded in the same year, 1996, started with a program in which you could build your own modular synthesizer out of virtual blocks, and later released software copies of famous machines, from the Prophet-5 to the Hammond organ.