the screen area is undefined. my plugins are fully resizable. and honestly i’d make this one quite big if i were you, to have more precision on the EQ pad.
anyway here’s another plugin with a design where the signal chain doesn’t follow the visible parameters:
a wavetable oscillator works like this:
- reading the phase from the wavetable
- remapping the phase (or even spectral properties) in various ways
- outputting the sound with added gain and pan
musically/workflow-wise the layout makes total sense, though. you have the most important oscillator features on the left and the optional fancy extra stuff on the right. seems to be less about travel distance and more about parameter relevance here, but the same logic would work for Manta’s design.
here we have ff saturn, a popular multiband saturation plugin. not the latest version, but doesn’t matter. i selected a band, gave it some drive and some of that “tone” EQ. what comes first? the drive or the EQ? maybe the drive, because all the red colour of it is higher in the UI. but maybe the EQ, because the interface of the selected band is in front of the red background colours. i have used this plugin for years and still no idea^^ what about the feedback/freq thing? does the comb filter come before the distortion or after it? despite an unclear signal chain design, the plugin is a well composed evergreen of plugin history.
Echobode is one of my favourite delays. especially before I switched to Bitwig it was the only way to have a frequency shifter in the feedback path of a delay. I’d consider the delay to be the first step in the signal chain, because everything else is basically in the delay. then ofc there is the big part, the frequency shifter, on the right of the interface. and a few additional things on the left, filters and smear (some sort of early reflections thingie). let’s ignore the modulation. modulation is rarely arranged as part of the signal chain anyway. but even the rest of the interface doesn’t say “read this from left to right” or “from top to bottom” but more like “mostly top to bottom, but the entire right side is for the main feature, because that’s where you will spend most of your time”
my personal conclusion is: it’s cool when you can arrange a UI just like the signal chain. but there can be exceptions when parameter relevance and mouse travel distance becomes more important, and it’s a bit subjective when that’s the case
