

Updates to the synth will address the CPU load in time that's how Arturia did with Analog Lab (and, I'm surmising, their V Collection) over the years as well. So if you can score it for $50 less, by all means, do it. I'm lucky to have bought it when they were pushing it at what's now half-price (only $99 for me at the time), and I noticed it was at $199 when September started. But it really is a veritable playground of sound. (I too am learning as I go along, so whatever else I find, I'll share.) My level of experience is that I don't get too far off into wavetable editing, and that's one of the other cons about this soft-synth. It IS a CPU hog, to be sure, but the rough trade-off there is you can always bounce your MIDI recording to audio if you're happy with the overall effect of the performance you "committed to tape". I was using NI's Komplete 10 (with some ala carte add-ons since its release), but what I like with Pigments is that it's geared for those who like designing their own sounds using stock patches as a springboard. It has an intriguing “Dark” mode button which adds nicely to the carnage.You're gonna like this Pigments soft-synth. It also has built-in filtering which is a useful thing to help focus the sound or take the edge off a little bit. The options give you a good range of sounds to play with and that Drive knob really drives it home. The Distortion Module combines 16 modes of distortion covering things like germanium fuzz to jagged wave folding as well as soft saturation and warmth.


This creates the opportunity for some pretty crazy stuff-into-stuff modulating modulation, which is great for getting deeper into sound design. You can now switch this section from Modulator to the other Sound Engine feeding in whatever waveforms you’re generating in one space into the FM inputs on the other.

Previously there’s been a Modulator section of the sound engine where you can feed waveforms into various bits of the oscillator(s) for a bit of FM action. You can layer the two together and add in noise or a sub-oscillator from the Utility Engine which came with version 3. Pigments uses two sound engines which can be wavetables, samples, harmonic or analogue oscillators. The big new thing is the ability to cross modulate between the sound engines. I enjoyed the new harmonic oscillator and Jupiter filter that came with version 3 and now we have some new ways to shape and destroy sound in version 3.5. Arturia continues to build on the impressive Pigments Polychrome Software Synthesizer.
