Most of us who use hi-tech tools in our music have more power available to us than we really need. We use a certain percentage of the true potential of our tools, but leave a good deal more unexploited. This is partly because there is so much that we can do with today's instruments that any one musician will inevitably only explore a portion of his or her tools' potential, and partly because of that perennial bug-bear of the digital age, the user interface. By definition, the user interface sits between the user and the guts of any piece of equipment, and determines how the user will relate to that equipment. The more conceptually easy it is to get to grips with a user interface, and the further it goes towards making all of the features of a particular device accessible, the more the user will be inclined to explore the darker recesses of sound programming — or even, at the most basic level, understand how to do things like edit effects in a multi-timbral setup, which is still a problem for some users. Quite apart from the fact that it is obviously better to understand your equipment than not, there are sound commercial reasons why manufacturers should pay particular attention to user interfaces.

In the field of synthesis in particular we seem to have reached a kind of plateau. Most of the current generation of top keyboards sound very similar (very good, but very similar), and all offer extremely powerful sound processing facilities. There is, however, simply not enough difference between many competing machines in terms of their sonic capability to make the advantages of one over another clear, and while this is a credit to the progress that has been made in synthesis, it strongly suggests that hardware manufacturers should put more effort into the user interfaces on their products.