I own and love Pigments, but I would love to have a hardware equivalent to complete my Digitakt/Syntakt/GrandMother/Keystep 37 DAWless setup
What is the closest when in comes to sound design and polyphony? It seems like Hydra desktop is a good choice, but what else would you think could be a good hardware synth (desktop version ideally)
Thanks!
I don’t have Pigments, so only know what I’ve seen online, but Korg’s Modwave is pretty insane and playable for a hardware wavetable synth with such a deep engine.
Not an answer to your questions, but I use Pigments/Ableton with a Novation SL MK3 and with the mapping to controllers and the ultra low latency I get from a 10-core MacMini, to me it’s really almost there. It feels more like hardware than computer, and I only use the mouse minimally. It’s very fast to use.
It’s actually a dope answer, thanks!
Astrolab, technically is pigment as a hardware synth.
Now it’s not like there is no actual alternative to Pigment in the hardware space. Iridium, 3rd Wave, Fantom n/zyme…
My question should be simply: What’s a good polyphonic desktop synth with wild sound design capacity 
Yeah It’s Astrolab. You just need to create your specific instances.
Plus it does all sorts of other things.
It’s crazy that Analog Lab Pro with V Collection doesn’t come included with this for €1,600/$2,000 or whatever the price is. You still need to drop another €600 for Analog Lab go get all the bells and whistles.
I guess you meant V Collection ? Analog Lab is 99 bucks.
Anyway, I see your point.
As mentioned earlier, Iridium desktop–and that’s coming from a long-time Pigments user.
I also second the 3rd Wave desktop, but it has a different feel to sound design than either Iridium or Pigments.
Great thing is, all of these respond so well to MPE control!
It would probably look like this
I think you are looking for the Waldorf Iridium Desktop.
These OpenLabs Mikos and stuff were my first dive into the GAS pool, I’d say.
Another vote for the Waldorf Iridium here.
Well… After doing some more research (And thank you to all you responders), I found that the modwave is very close in design because it combines wavetable and sample playback, plus the sequencer. So I am very tempted by this option.
Was just going to comment on this with Korg modwave suggestion, maybe paired up with wavestate. Looking at the native plugin for modwave, even UI matches up well.
Waldorf iridium I feel would be the closest equivalent. Analog modeling, wavetable, granular and resonant plus kernel mode which is like super FM. Also tons of modulation sources and destinations, lots of effects, lots of envelopes, LFOs, sequencer etc etc
In terms of raw sound I can’t say if they sound similar or not though I’ve owned both and have used both extensively I never really did a one to one comparison just noticed how similar they are in terms of sound generation and modulation.
(Edit: looks like a lot of other people noticed the similarities as well lol. Posted my reply before reading the whole thread)
Incidentally, Bad Gear posted this recently!
I wonder how close to Pigments capabilities the MiniFreak gets you
