I was checking out some of the Plugmon skins for various u-he synths recently and I was thinking to myself, “Wow, I could actually use Hive if it looked like that”. Then I started to wonder if anyone actually prefers the opposite.
(one thing to note is that most of the stock skins have multiple tabs that hide functions, whereas Plugmon manages to worm them all into one screen so you don’t have to click on any of the tabs – but they also look different)
So I guess the question is simple, so I can make a poll out of it:
I prefer more tabs, menus, and obscurity even if it looks like a toy
I prefer everything being laid out, even if it looks complex
Something in between or other (please mention!)
0voters
Genuinely curious about this one. It kind of keeps me up at night, ngl
i think for me it’s somewhere in between the two. largely because i hate digging into menus, tabs, etc. however i don’t mind the more advanced features and such being one step removed. this seems to help with the interface not being so complex and busy
I don’t use Ace or Bazille, so I can’t really speak on them. Hive I have used in one form or another for like 8 years though. I would say it was fine when it was just a VA synth, then they added Wavetables with version two and I think I’ve used them like 3 times because the UI around that is really, really bad.
I don’t complain about Hive too much though, because at it’s core I think it’s close to 15 years old and it wasn’t designed to be a wavetable synth (that was a free upgrade). Don’t lick a gift horse in the ass (I think that’s how that saying goes right?).
If Hive did everything it does today from the start, I think the interface would look very different, but I’m familiar enough with what it is that anything else would look weird to me. Like if your wife of 10 years suddenly got a hot face with plastic surgery… it might technically be an improvement but it would still take getting used to looking at a new face every morning.
I want it to be logical and intuitive - if it’s a feature I’m going to use constantly (ADSR, envelope, modulation) it needs to not be buried in menus. If you want to add a bunch of complexity that I’m going to rarely/never use (matrix mixer, modulation matrix, your shitty effects because you can’t ship something without effects these days), stick it in a menu where I can go deal with it if and when I need it.
I think @White_Noise is spot on regarding age - there seems to have been a renaissance in the last half a decade regarding layout and usability. Some plugins have got the message, some not so much, but almost anything from 10+ years ago feels like a mess to me, and way too close to the misery of hardware menu diving.
A good example would be Omnisphere vs Falcon - both ridiculously powerful and full-featured, but Omni feels like using a relic from a bygone era compared to the moderness of Falcon, just in the way the two approach screen real estate (obviously there’s like a decade difference between the two, so makes sense). I’d call out Pigments as another one that has a ton of flexibility but puts its ‘main screen’ to good use while burying the less needed features in menus.
Not using Hive or ACE, but from a very quick glance, the new skins of these look better to me. They are clear, dark and easy on the eye. For Bazille though, I would go with the old one. I don’t see any improvement in the new one and it’s very bright…
In general, I don’t mind submenus (I use Unreal Engine and Metasounds a lot where you usually have to type in the name of nodes in a menu because there are so many), but only if they behave well: not disappearing unexpectedly, taking too long to scroll through, having to wait for stuff to open while hovering and so on. But usually, the less clicks, the better (I don’t like Falcon very much for that reason since it takes me more clicks to assign modulation than in any other synth I know).
I actually prefer the stock skins of B and C, and maybe even A, but I don’t use any of these instruments. The white UI of Bazille looks stressful to my eyes.
The one thing to note about the Bazille theme was that it was kind of restructured and all placed into one tab instead of having separate FX and other windows. And I think he recently made a dark one, because nobody used to care about that, either.
Hey, that’s another weird one – why did we all collectively start requiring dark themes recently? The saga continues
For me, I got an OLED monitor and they recommend dark mode on everything to prevent burn in. I use that for gaming and not production, but still that affects my web browsing.
For me personally, it got more attractive as the monitors I bought had higher nits and contrast. Night mode feels like a workaround for modern monitor whites being so goddamn bright – full on ‘day mode’ at max brightness is like having a flashlight pointed at my face. I’ve kept my monitors pretty low brightness and middling contrast for ages because I don’t work in the dark and I found it reduced eye strain. I guess it’s like mixing at lower volumes so you don’t tire our your ears.
That said, I don’t specifically like night mode in the general case. My coding environments tend to be lower contrast with the occasional higher contrast to pick out keywords (something akin to Material or Zenburn themes). Similar with Ableton, but obviously plugins don’t respect that.
But it’s horses for courses - if I’m trying to read text on a page, especially a lot of it, I want dark text on a light background, preferably low contrast. If I’m trying to pick out a (virtual) button or knob or whatever, light foreground/dark background is fine and possibly helpful.
I have been switching to darker backgrounds when possible for a long time, just feels better for my eyes. I think it started many years ago when I discovered that I could just change the background color of a statistical program I was using a lot from a glaring white to whatever I wanted, I could hardly believe it at first and was really happy…
