Plug-In Design Open Thread...

Over yonder (how is distance measured on the Intergoogles?) on KvR, Shamann started what has turned in to a semi-interesting thread on the base nature of plug-in design. To save you the trouble of reading all eight pages if you, like, have a life and stuff, the commenters are divided in to two camps:

1. All Or Nothing, Beeyatch!!! These sorts want every single possible parameter on a plug-in to have an attendant control on the UI, so that just in case they might want to touch a little something up, the option is there. Or, alternately, they want to spend a lot of time tweaking.

2. Keep It Simple, Stupid!!! These sorts (and I’ll freely admit I fall squarely in this camp) want immediacy and simplicity, because they’re apparently busy working on their song arrangements or getting the right sounds. If they want a delay, they want to instance a delay, select the appropriate preset, and go back to work.

Now, there are certainly products for both schools of thought. U-He makes incredibly sophisticated designs with a lot of parameters, for people that like to take the time to fine-tune every little thing. We, on the other hand, generally make simpler products that kind of work within our worldview of How Things Should Sound, but don’t really leave a lot outside of that, generally.

Audio Damage has released, for the last couple years, products that generally are designed specifically to please group #2, at group #1’s expense. However, we have a couple things lined up (and I suppose BigSeq2 would come in to the conversation here) where there is enough complexity to where group #2 is going to suffer a bit, and group #1 will accordingly be happier.

Since there’s no earthly reason for us to pay for marketing research when we’ve got you guys here, I’ll pose the question. (and in deference to you, my loyal readers, I’ll mention that I have a fairly good idea of what the answer is going to be already) Do you fall in group #1 or group #2? As always with comments here, you should provide a little color commentary. What plug-in best exemplifies the approach you favor? Do you occasionally cross the border and do things the other way? That sort of thing.