Four studios. One recording standard. Every preset you have ever heard from us was born here.
Berlin. Brooklyn. Nashville. Tokyo. Four cities, four acoustics, four crews of working sound designers — all playing back through the same $2.4 million analog outboard chain and shipping to you at 24-bit / 96 kHz. This is the boutique infrastructure behind 3,200+ presets and the reason no VLSound library ever sounds stock.
Rooms built around the instruments. Not the other way around.
A mass-market sample library is engineered backwards: a marketing team picks a genre, a content farm licences a thousand loops off a royalty-free aggregator, and the result ships in a slick UI to fill a category on a retailer's shelf. We have never worked that way, and we never will.
Our four studios exist because specific rooms make specific instruments sound the way they were designed to sound. A Buchla 200e inside a heavily-treated Brooklyn drum room is a different instrument than a Buchla 200e played dry into a stereo pair at a desk in someone's bedroom — and the second version is what you have already heard on a thousand "vintage modular" libraries. VLSound ships the first.
Every room was chosen for its acoustic character and its existing crew of working musicians. Berlin holds the electronic and modular program because Berlin is where the modular scene still lives. Brooklyn holds the beatmaking program because that is where the drummers, the MPC operators, and the tape heads already work. Nashville holds the orchestral and acoustic program because the session players are fifteen minutes away. Tokyo holds the FM and experimental program because the people who own the rare Yamaha, Korg and Roland FM hardware live there. We did not impose a brand template on four interchangeable rooms — we built a network around four existing scenes.
That is also why every VLSound release ships at 24-bit / 96 kHz with an average uncompressed file size of roughly 8.4 GB. Downsampling saves bandwidth, but it removes the high-end harmonic content that makes a struck cymbal, a bowed Rhodes tine, or a saturated tape return sound like a real event instead of a clean loop. Our customers are paying for the room, the chain, and the headroom — not for the smallest possible download. We refuse to compress what they came for.
— VLSound Audio Labs, since 2009.
Four categories of analog hardware that feed every library.
$2.4M of boutique tube, tape, spring and rare-synth outboard — distributed across Berlin, Brooklyn, Nashville and Tokyo. Every signal passes through this chain before it ever touches a converter.
Source signal chain — Instrument → Boutique mic → Tube preamp → Analog summing bus → Tape saturation → Converters @ 96 kHz / 24-bit. No plugins in the capture path. The signal hits the DAW exactly as it left the room.
Four cities. Four sonic specialisations. One recording standard.
-
01Berlin · DE
Electronic & Modular Program
Home of the modular and wavetable program. Housed in a converted factory loft in Kreuzberg with a 60 m² live room, two iso booths, and the largest Eurorack and Buchla inventory outside Japan. Source material here drives the VLS Kaleidoscope wavetable synth and the Modular Drums and Berlin Modular libraries.
- Live room60 m² · variable diffusion
- Head designersHenning S. · Tarek O.
- FeedsKaleidoscope · Modular Drums · Berlin Modular
-
02Brooklyn · NY
Hip-Hop & Beatmaking Program
A 90 m² converted warehouse room in Greenpoint outfitted with a vintage SSL 4000G, an MPC60 and MPC3000, and three drum kits tuned for boom-bap, lo-fi and trap. This is where the drum-break, vinyl-noise and MPC chop libraries are recorded and processed.
- ConsoleSSL 4000G · 48 channels
- Head designersMarcus W. · Janelle R.
- FeedsBoom-Bap Breaks · MPC Vault · Vinyl Noise
-
03Nashville · TN
Acoustic & Orchestral Program
A purpose-built tracking room on Music Row with a 120 m² main live area at 6 m ceiling height — sized for a full string section, three percussionists and a Steinway D at once. All acoustic, orchestral and room-IR content is captured here through a Coles 4038 and Neumann M50 tree.
- Live room120 m² · 6 m ceiling · hardwood
- Head designersDaniel K. · Sarah P.
- FeedsNashville Strings · Room IR Vol. 1–4
-
04Tokyo · JP
FM Synthesis & Experimental Program
A small, dry room in Shimokitazawa built around three FM flagships — a Yamaha TX81Z, DX7II and FS1r — plus a rare Roland MKS-70 and a Korg volca rack. All wavetable and FM-side content in the experimental VLS engines is sourced here.
- FlagshipsTX81Z · DX7II · FS1r
- Head designersAiko M. · Ren H.
- FeedsFM Laboratory · Volca Vault · East Asia Tape
From a played performance to a finished preset — in five engineering steps.
Every sample that ships under the VLSound name moves through the same capture-to-curation pipeline. No shortcuts, no stock libraries, no algorithmic gap-filling — a documented chain that 22 in-house sound designers and 11 engineers repeat, library after library, since 2009.
-
STEP 01
Mic & Preamp Selection
The source — a drum, a voice, a modular patch, a Steinway — is captured with a mic pair matched to its harmonic content. Ribbon on guitar cabs, small-diaphragm condensers on percussion, large-diaphragm tube mics on vocals. Every mic runs through a dedicated boutique tube preamp before the rest of the chain.
-
STEP 02
Analog Sum & EQ
Channels are summed through the room's analog summing bus — SSL in Brooklyn, Neve in Berlin, API in Nashville, Rupert Neve in Tokyo — with surgical passive EQ shaping the source before it ever hits a converter. This is also where the first round of harmonic coloration enters the signal.
-
STEP 03
Tape Saturation
The summed signal is routed through one of three tape machines — Studer, ATR or Ampex — at calibrated record levels per source. Saturation is dialed in by ear, then re-checked against the dry capture to make sure the harmonic enrichment is repeatable across the full library.
-
STEP 04
96 kHz / 24-bit Capture
The saturated analog signal lands in the DAW at 96 kHz / 24-bit, with no plugins in the capture path and no rate conversion. A reference tone is printed before every session. We keep the raw multi-track session archived — the library you download is exactly what the microphones heard.
-
STEP 05
Hand-Curation By Designers
One of our 22 in-house sound designers — every one of them with commercial credits on record — listens to every take, edits, maps, scripts and tests the final preset in the target engine. Out of an average 2,400 raw captures per library, around 240 are promoted into the shipping catalog. The rest are archived but not sold.