Playing around with the presets of the factory library had me wander off with new ideas quite a few times, and creating some sounds from scratch was both fun and effective.

But when it comes to softsynths, there’s only a few I typically reach for time and time again: Diva, Massive and Serum.Įven though I’ve only had a few days with Pigments 4, I can already tell this one will become a staple in my music productions as well. Running a blog like Rekkerd comes with the perk of having a huge arsenal of plugins at my disposal. And, once again this update is completely free for existing Pigments users! So what do I think? So, perhaps not as big an update as previous versions (at least sound-wise), but Arturia keeps finding useful additions to bring more value to this powerful synth. The synth now sports a total of 18 effects, with some of them having been updated with improvements for Pigments 4.

A Shimmer pitch-shift delay/reverb effect will have you design ambient sounds in no time, and there’s also a new Super Unison module that can double your signal up to 8 times, and detune, modulate and stereo-spread the sound. The considerable collection of filter types sees the addition of a resonant MS-20 filter, great for making sounds scream.

The factory library has been expanded with more presets (now at a total of 1,400), wavetables, samples and noises, and the synth comes with an updated wavetable engine (ring modulation and pulse width phase transformation) and harmonic engine (phase modulation and partial randomization), as well as a few new effects.

The advanced color-coded modulation system now lets you drag and drop modulation sources directly to destinations, and other workflow improvements include compatibility with ODDSound’s MTS-ESP microtuning, new LFO waveform presets, and bypass buttons for the FX and sequencer in the top toolbar.

Pigments 3 review