Hi everyone - I’m the developer of EG Tone, a small guitar tone app/plugin I’m building for beginners and home players.
One thing I’m trying to get right is in-app help for guitar effects: short explanations for knobs, effect blocks, buttons, and signal-flow decisions so a newer player is not forced to guess what “presence”, “sag”, “cab”, or routing controls are doing.
For people using guitar plugins inside Gig Performer: does that kind of contextual help actually make a plugin easier to use live or in rehearsals, or would it just get in the way once you already know your setup?
I don’t want to turn this into a sales pitch, so here is just the free web tuner/tools entry point if anyone wants to see the general direction of the beginner-facing UI: Guitar Tuner | EG Tone
Any blunt feedback on what would be useful vs. noise would help.
Have you already used Gig Performer by yourself?
Are you familiar with the way GP works and how it is used?
(No offense)
GP brings the opportunity to create your own UI with exactly those parameters, dials, switches, etc. you personally need, without the neccessity to have the plugin UI per se opened.
So in most cases it would just not matter if there was a contextual help or not, since the plugin UI would not be seen anyway.
Maybe it might be helpful when building a rackspace (and its UI), or when dialling in a certain sound (that then will be represented by the whole rackspace, not neccessarily by a particular plugin).
Even though i’m not a guitar-pro, i personally have no strong feeling for this kind of contextual help in a plugin, when it is used within GP, but it also would’nt mean a distraction, most probably.
I do play guitar (not professionally) using GP and this is my personal experience: I have created 6 rackspaces (you might call this ‘presets’): clean for elem 3, clean for elem 1/2, mild crunch with lots pingpong delay, mild crunch, distortion and solo.
I have tweaked the plugins in these rackspaces to my own taste. From there I do not interact with the plugins. Also during a performance I do not change anything.
My rackspaces are not eyecandy. (Although for my bass guitar rackspace, I went to limits with visual fading in/out buttons and so on. But I never touch any controls )
So in the end: tooltips are only important during design and only if the controls have proprietary/special features. For gain, balance, volume, delay, et cetera I don’t need it (but it doesn’t hurt either).
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