Hi everyone. I am the developer of EG Tone, so I want to be transparent that this is my own project. I am building a beginner-friendly guitar tone/practice app and plugin, and I am trying to make the software less confusing for players who are new to audio interfaces, amp sims, routing, and plugin controls.
I noticed in guitar software that short control explanations can be really useful, but they can also get in the way if they feel too much like a manual. As a small free entry point, I also made a browser tuner here:
For people who use guitar software a lot: would contextual explanations for knobs, effects, and signal-chain buttons actually help beginners, or would you prefer the UI to stay minimal and let the manual handle it?
If this is not the right category, I am happy to remove the post.
First and foremost I wish you well on your journey. Finding the right balance between information and TL;DR is a non-trivial challenge for many things, and the moreso when you’re a beginner at something.
And we’re all beginners at something, right?
One thing I would offer, as a generalization based on my own experience and that of others I have worked with, is that what most makes the difference between “practically useful” and “sounds like a manual” is addressing the “why would I do that?” question. It’s one thing to say e.g. that the “filter” knob on a delay “adjusts the lowpass filter for the modulation”, but a newcomer to delay might reasonably ask, “great, but why would I do that?”
I’ve seen some UIs that feature a layer of tooltips that can be enabled/disabled; usually these just give the minimal blurb about what this knob or that slider does, which can be really helpful to someone who just needs to know what is where on the layout, but leads to a lot of questions for the newbie. What would be a nice “extra” to this design would be a little link on each tooltip (maybe titled “more…” or “why use this?” that leads direct into that section of the manual, which itself includes both what I call “the twiddly bits” of detail, and also the “why would I do that?” answer.
I’d have loved things like that in my own learning adventure thus far, but good doc is hard to find (and much appreciated when you do find it) and the “why do I care?” question is important for really learning something. This forum here has taught me a great deal about that; there are all kinds of goodies I hadn’t ever known about until someone here patiently pointed out the available tool I missed, or reminded me of its purpose, or suggested an angle I hadn’t ever thought of for approaching solving a problem. Distilling that sort of richness into self-serve help assistance is challenging, and again I wish you well for making the effort down that path!
