From Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins to Foo Fighters, Green Day and his own band Garbage, Butch Vig has contributed his signature sound to some of the most legendary albums of the modern rock era. One of the defining elements of the “Butch Vig Sound” is Vig’s unique vocal stamp. I don't know why audio software has looked like this for the better part of two decades, but I'd like to honor these sins of UI with a tour of some of the most egregious examples.Widely considered one of the most influential rock producers of recent decades, Butch Vig helped spawn an entirely new rock genre. But when a project really gets cooking, one can amass eight or ten of these interfaces overlapping each other on the screen at once, and that's when skeuomorph hell really comes into focus. A panel of 3D knobs here, a pixelated oscilloscope there. But all audio software, for what I suppose are historical reasons, features the most egregious skeuomorphic design in all of software.Īlone, each plugin is hideous in its own unique way. I spend a lot of my time mixing and editing audio, and that often involves having multiple audio plugins (essentially applications that run inside the main audio program) from multiple vendors running simultaneously.

Winamp may have been Patient Zero in this gaudy epidemic, but it has spread far and wide. Except you have to control them with a mouse.

Faders, switches, knobs, needles twitching between numbers on a volume meter - they’re all there. The first Billboard #1 single that was recorded to a hard drive instead of tape was “Livin’ La Vida Loca” in 1999 18 years later, in 2017, most audio software still looks like the designers attempted to replicate physical equipment piece for piece on a computer screen.

But no area of computing has so thoroughly gone for it more than audio software.

Waves butch vig vocals plugin metal