Go Back To The Future with Steinberg Classics, 5 Free Early VSTs!
Celebrate 30 years of VST Plugins
5,0 / 5,0 | 
Steinberg Classics is a new collection of their original VST plugins, released to celebrate 30 years of the VST plugin format!
For those of you old enough, like me, cast your mind back 30 years to 1996. I had just bought my first PC copy of Steinberg‘s all-conquering sequencer, Cubase 3 and was told by the sales assistant (remember those??) that there was a new version of Cubase coming out in a few months.
Before I could register my outrage, I was told that because I had bought my copy within the grace period, I’d get my upgrade free of charge. Suitably calmed down, I asked what was coming in the new version. The sales assistant did that slight roll of the eyes and a shoulder shrug and said, “Virtual instruments, mate! Synths that run in your computer!”
Back To The Future
Fast forward to 2026, and our shared incredulity and disparaging remarks all those years ago have more than come back to haunt us! I didn’t have much money back then, and my PC wasn’t the most powerful, so when my upgrade arrived, I fired up an instance of VB-1, the all-new ‘virtual bass instrument’ and was left decidedly unimpressed! It offered nothing new and was somewhat laggy!
I resisted plugins for some years, thinking them to be superfluous and not a patch on the real thing. I even won letter of the month in Future Music magazine, bemoaning software synths as poor cousins to proper hardware. Oh how I came to eat my words!
Steinberg Classics
Well, here we are, and Steinberg has decided to celebrate this pretty momentous anniversary with the release of Steinberg Classics, a free collection of five of their first VST plugins, consisting of four instruments and one FX unit. The plugins are:
- VB-1 – Virtual Bass Instrument
- CS-40 – 6-Voice polyphonic synth
- Neon – A compact poly synth
- LM-7 – Drum Sample Unit
- Karlette – Tape Delay
Firing these up is a real time-travel trip. Rather than modernise these fossils, Steinberg Classics delivers all five plugins with their tiny interfaces, best suited for the 640×480 resolution screens of the day, but still usable and, in most cases, nostalgic fun.
How Times Have Changed
If anything, this collection serves a simple function as a reminder of exactly how far we have come. The software plugin revolution was slow to pick up, with a lot of people simply not having the hardware resources to run them efficiently. Oh, the irony!
But as computer hardware caught up with software developers’ ambitions, we now live in a world where plugins, be they instruments or FX, have literally changed the way we approach music making with technology.
Nostalgia Trip
Steinberg Classics is a rose-tinted, risk-free way of invoking nostalgia for us oldies. Quite what the kids who weren’t even born when these first debuted will make of them, I just don’t know. Either way, tell us in the comments below. Has this trip down memory lane made you pine for the good ol’ days, or step back in disbelief at how we ever coped!
More Information
Steinberg Classics run as VST3 plugins only, which I suppose is to be expected. Sorry Logic users! You’ll need a 64bit Windows 10 or 11 system or anything from macOS Big Sur upwards to run these. Simply log in to your Steinberg account and download and install Steinberg Classics via their download manager application.
- Steinberg Classics Website
- More from Steinberg
- Steinberg at Thomann
If you’re proper old school, and still rock an old version of Mac OS X or Windows, Steinberg has released four vintage VST’s just for you, including the VB-1, Neon, Karlette and interestingly Model E, their Minimoog “clone”, which has strangely been omitted from the modern release, possibly for legal reasons? Grab them here!
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