The story of Native Instruments begins in 1995, in a small home office in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Here is where the vision of a new kind of musical instrument was born and turned into reality. Enter Stephan Schmitt, a hardware engineer by trade who developed mixing desks at the time. An active live musician and synthesizer player, Stephan Schmitt had reached the point where he felt profoundly limited by the instruments that were available to him. Hardware synthesizers seemed not only overly bulky and expensive but also very much limited in terms of sonic potential and musical expressiveness.

In his search for a solution, Stephan Schmitt realized that standard personal computers could be used as powerful musical instruments. The ever-growing computational power brought real-time software synthesis into the realm of possibility, and Stephan Schmitt envisioned a computer-based sound-generation platform that could leave existing limitations far behind. Together with programmer Volker Hinz, he developed the concept of the first modular software synthesizer, which was eventually called GENERATOR. A radically innovative approach, GENERATOR allowed for the construction of virtually any kind of sound generation and sound-processing device from a set of basic building blocks, and offered a sonic flexibility that was literally unheard of.