Most innovation starts as unusable engineering

Why Unusable Engineering?

Because it is fun! Unusable Engineering is about following ideas that might not serve a commercial purpose. Staying true to a concept instead of watering it down to a common utility. Most of the time the office is invested in exploring a concept that we shelf the next day. We search for new angles or just different solutions to common audio processes. For us, that is what most real innovation looks like. There is a growing graveyard of concepts here. We keep them around as trophies, sometimes to be revisited with a new mindset. We like the unusable, but we try to take the best ideas and polish them into something creative, that brings joy to you when you use it.

The name felt both fun and honest. And most of what we do, before a plugin becomes something that brings joy and inspiration in a session, is unusable engineering. Every little failure is a learning. The goal is to do that messy and chaotic part thoroughly, so the finished tool feels simple, expressive, and fun when it reaches your DAW.

How that turns into real products

The company started with two parallel backgrounds colliding in a useful way: years of making music and years of building products as developer, designer and product officer. On one side, there is the studio reality, where ideas have a short window before momentum is gone. On the other side, there is engineering discipline, where systems are tested, measured, and iterated until behavior is dependable.

Unusable lives in that overlap. The process is not about making everything totally new all the time. Sometimes it is about rethinking known ideas and implementing them in a different way. Other times it is about following a strange concept until it becomes musically useful. In both cases, the final product should be a joy to use and generate top quality results.

The unusable lineup

The core of the Unusable Engineering products is motion. We've always loved sequencers and modulators, but both in hardware and software, it tends to be a time-consuming project to get it up. And often it is focused on exact control. At Unusable we strive for happy accidents, for introducing a bit of chaos. So we try to add randomization options everywhere it makes sense, and simple slot sequencers in all our products. That way we can introduce a quick way to bring motion into audio processors that are usually static.

We like to explore concepts that are not related or just through a different mental model. With the scientist suite, the metaphor-driven ideas come alive. It includes a thermodynamic approach to compression control, distortion behavior shaped by fluid-dynamics concepts. We follow mental physical models to make a multi-tap delay that is quick and easy to work with. In general we love a simple concept. And even better, when that concept proves to be much more usable and wider than first assumed. It is not really about totally new concepts, but about merging different models in ways that brings joy and surprises.

Simple interfaces. Added motion. Expressive results.

Why it is built this way

Most musicians, sonic explorers and producers do not need more menus, we even doubt that they enjoy them in the first place... We don't want to build "do-it-all" tools that takes weeks to learn, months to master... We treat interface clarity as part of sonic quality. We don't make interfaces with hidden panels, we want something that is readable in a fast way, that does not slow down the creative process.

We optimize for useful sweet spots, controllable extremes and motion. We want the interaction to feel rewarding, surprising and creative.

How do we run the business

Unusable Engineering is based on the idea of being fair and personal. We don't like subscriptions, so we don't offer them. We don't like sales and discounts that are time limited, so we offer our products at a fair price point all the time. We don't offer demos, but have a full 30-day refund policy, no questions asked.

We don't like plugins that calls home, or limit amount of possible installs. So we don't make them that way. The goal is not to be a huge corporation doing wild marketing with dubious claims. The goal is to make a decent living, to have fun and hopefully to bring some joy to our users. To inspire new musical ideas.

In general the business is based on treating everyone like we would like to be treated. Yes, fair and personal.

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