Unreal Devices
Electronic Musical Instruments

UNREAL DEVICES was founded in 2023 to work alongside our parent company, Infection Music, with the goal of developing new and innovative electronic musical instruments.

Nearly every manufacturing company in the world supports a wide range of research and development projects. With a well-thought out specification, appropriate funding and the right skills, these projects produce prototype and development instruments which, in turn, go on to become fully functional, market-ready products.

What happens to these prototype and development instruments when a product is released? Where do they go? A warehouse? Sold on? A Skip? Landfill?

Similarly, many of these R & D projects result in dead ends, would-be products that never quite reached their full potential or were poorly specified or just didn't meet their design goals. Many such products end up on the scrap heap or in landfill.

At Unreal Devices, we believe that this wasteful practice is wrong. That's why we're here. To cut down on waste and to pick up projects that may have been scrapped or cancelled or just fallen off the radar.

Our goals

UNREAL DEVICES was created to address the issue of waste. We will take on a small number of abandoned projects and develop them to their logical conclusion. These projects almost certainly won't ever become fully-fledged products, although some might.

However, this is not the end of the story. Once complete, UNREAL DEVICES will put the majority of these finished works into the Public Domain - the code, the schematics, Gerber files, front panels etc - so that others can learn, build and enjoy.

Most of these projects will be available either for free or for a small donation, simply to help pay for the web site and the associated hosting services. We're also looking into a Patreon site to support this enterprise.

Work-in-Progress

UNREAL DEVICES is a brand new adventure. We're still developing ideas and potential directions. Not everything is up and running. We're only able to work on these projects in the evenings and at weekends, subject to familial constraints and the need to occasionally take a break from the development system and try to remember what daylight looks like.

Be patient. We're working on it...

Questions? Drop us a line...

Latest Updates

  • December 2023 : Web Pages

    We're updating the web site. This version has been re-designed from the ground up and should (hopefully) load on all modern browsers. If it doesn't then please let us know.

  • December 2023 : Modular

    Now that the world is a calmer, brighter place, I've had a chance to re-examine the modular project. Kinda staggered at how far we got with this project, only for it to be dropped. A shame.

  • December 2023: Plasma Synth

    I've been re-working Plasma's sound engine so that it's more like IML's Echo and it sounds a lot better. Still can't get the Sync to work reliably.

  • November 2023 : Fun with VACTROLs

    I needed a quick 'n' dirty voltage control circuit for an analogue input and Metal Mickey suggested a Vactrol. Basically, just an LED and a photocell / optoisolator, a resistor and a capacitor. Whilst the outcome wasn't what you'd call perfect, it did the job. And I liked it so much, I built a bank of the things.

    I'll post a video once I've tidied the project up a bit.

Additional information

This section of the web site hasn't been fully updated yet. Don't worry. Check back in a few days and it should be sorted.