Yamaha VSS-30

An 8-bit sampling keyboard that Sigur Rós have been feeding found sounds into since at least 2005. It was never meant to be a studio tool.

Overview

The same article is candid about the quality. Jónsi himself called it "like a toy," compared it to the Casio SK-1, and praised it because "it has an 8-bit sample rate, it's really sh*tty quality, but it's really gritty and cool." That's not a collector sniping from a distance. That's the endorsement. The VSS-30's value is its degradation. Engineers and producers reach for it when they want a sound that has been chewed up and spit out, not preserved.

Alex Somers, who co-produced and mixed Kveikur, described his workflow with it in the same Electronic Musician piece: "It's such a creative tool because it narrows down your focus. The sample time is only a few seconds, so you get these little blips. And what you can do with that is so surprising. You can U-Turn it, put some fuzz on it, or turn the attack way up for a nice, slow attack. So you'd never know what the sound was." That's the most concrete description of how it works that's available. Short sample time, a reverse/"U-Turn" function, some form of fuzz or distortion, and an attack control. Those are the features to check against any listing.

The article also notes the VSS-30 has graced Sigur Rós albums "as far back as 2005's Takk... and perhaps even further." So it's a long-running studio tool for that band, not a one-off novelty. On Kveikur the band sampled "everything from Celeste, glockenspiel, strings, and Wurlitzer to tuned gongs and found sounds," and the resulting "squeaky 8-bit trails" were then treated and inserted into the mix. In practice the job is to capture a few seconds of something, mangle it, and drop it into a production.

The VSS-30 is a PortaSound, which means a home keyboard with a sampling feature bolted on. It is not a professional sampler. The sample time is measured in seconds, not minutes. No MIDI is mentioned in any of the available documentation, and there's no recall. The Electronic Musician piece groups it with "older gear, with no MIDI and no recall" that was "tracked intentionally out of the grid then edited down." You have to commit to a sound because you can't save it.

The EQ Magazine (April 2010, p.11) coverage of the same Sigur Rós sessions backs this up. The band's approach was to keep things "sounding dirty and never too polished," and the VSS-30 was one of the tools for that. Somers re-sampled piano parts, backing vocals, and whole mixes through a Neumann into Logic's ESX24, but he also used "more lo-fi means, with an 8-bit Yamaha VSS-30 sampler." It wasn't a compromise forced by budget. It was a deliberate choice alongside expensive gear.

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Yamaha VSS-30

Overview

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