The many, many ways you can route and manipulate patches brings the beast to life in a way I’m not sure I’ve experienced since falling in love with Swarms by Spitfire Audio. The more you explore, the more alive and almost sentient Pigments becomes. The deeper you dig, the more you’ll find, and the deeper in love you will fall. You can get what you need very simply on the ‘surface’ interface, but this is only a gateway drug. This summarises the brilliance of Pigments.
The effects and sequencer tabs offer up more opportunities for travel than every airport on earth, and yet don’t need a warehouse full of Ordnance Survey maps or a team of Sherpas to navigate. The Utility Engine is a playground where madmen become angels and where even the most mild-mannered and gentle sonic explorer can kiss god. Or trying to describe what a deeply personal experience like losing your virginity feels like. Trying to describe the joy of the utility engine would also be like giving someone the spoilers for a film they’re are about to watch. I feel I’m abandoning my duty as a reviewer by not describing every aspect of the utility engine, but while the controls are few, the possibilities are incalculably vast. The synth tab is split up into three main ‘engines’, each accessible via its own tab. The synth tab has the controls you might expect to find on a hardware synthesizer front and centre, subtly surrounded by an array of ‘fine detail’ controls and (depending on what sound journey you are on) a whole collection of ‘fun stuff’. I found it very hard to get lost while using Pigments, and that’s impressive.
The main section of the software changes but remains consistent throughout. The Pigments interface is split into three main tabs Synth, FX and Seq. Regardless of how knowledgeable you are about synthesis I wholly believe that you’ll feel at home as soon as you load Pigments. The interface just makes sense on so many levels. Pigments has a very shallow learning curve. Pigments 3 isn’t the only ‘do it all’ soft synth package on the market, so what marks it out as different? Simplicity. Pigments is like a reliable friend who will always support you, love you dearly, has your back in a fight, but happens to also like mayonnaise on cornflakes. But the stranger side of sound mangling doesn’t detract from the overall solid brilliance of this soft synth. I was going to add a list of caveats about some wilder requirements not being present in this soft-synth, but in reality, Pigments is plenty full of weirdness. In fact, I can probably sum up the question of specifications by saying that if there’s something sonic you want, then you’ll probably find it in Pigments. I decided against listing all the technical specifications for Pigments – Arturia do a thorough job of listing tech specs on their website. But we’re going to look at what this instrument might do for you as an instrument of inspiration, rather than list technical specifications. I expect you are reading this review because you want to learn more about Arturia Pigments 3, and you need not worry because that is what you will get. Inspiration is probably the answer to both questions, so can inspiration be bought? But if we’re all playing by the same set of rules how are we creating such a vast spectrum of music? How, for example, can a hip-hop producer look at a particular instrument and use it for bowel-shaking bass, while a soundtrack composer uses the exact same instrument to emphasise tension in a scene. In theory, the fundamentals of music theory can be broken down into a set of rules that are quite mechanical and mathematical. Especially when we're talking about the sort of crisp digital sounds of a wavetable synth or even the harmonic engine.Last Updated on Apby Andrew Culture Is this just another Arturia Pigments review? Not really…ĭeveloping as a musician is a curious phenomenon. Those aren't the kinds features that inspire fawning headlines, but they can add a lot of depth and nuance to your sounds. This new third layer to a sound is specifically for adding noise and sub bass. Personally I think the most exciting addition is the utility engine. It also has dual morphing formant filters that can sand off some of the harsh edges, allowing you to get vowel like sounds. A little bit of detune and reverb can go a long way here. I'm especially a fan when it comes to low bassy growls and drones. The results are often reedy or organ-like. The TL DR version is that it uses a combination of sinewaves at different frequencies to generate harmonic overtones. Harmonic additive synthesis is not a particular common method for sound generation, but it can be quite fun and unique. That harmonic engine is probably the headlining feature of Pigments 3.