Pigments : Arturia Wavetable Synth

The Lounge Other Gear
#307

Yeah, I’ve tried out Phase Plant and Falcon and other things and I always come back to the fact that ableton is a modular synth in itself. Sure there might be workflow improvements from something like Phase Plant and Falcon is probably way more powerful but you can treat each of abletons synths as oscillators in their own rights and feed them along their own FX chains or sum them through one fx chain and really do whatever you want.

Ned Rush is probably the one guy on YouTube that really fucks around with Ableton as an instrument (outside of the individual instruments) and he’s so inspiring that I’ve begun to look at a lot of my stuff and realize I really don’t need it.

4 Likes
#308

They mostly say for ambient but if you explore and dig into what you are trying to do there is surely something. I don’t think I have tried everything in ableton no way. I have gotten way to lazy. :cactus:

#309

Does this actually have a sound?

Wavetable is pretty damn flexible and after using it in the latest Jamuary, I’m pretty impressed… BUT I’m sure I could do something similar with Hive 2 or even Live’s Wavetable (once fx are added to the chain).

#310

As a VST, particularly of this kind, think it has a great UI. But sound wise, outside of pads, weird rhythmic stuff, soundscapes, some leads and keys, I don’t think it sounds special. Struggling to get really solid soinding bass, or comparable bass to other VST synths like Repro or anything UHe.

1 Like
#311

I’m not sure if this is an Arturia specific thing. When I demoed some V collection stuff I compared their Prophet to Softube and Uhe. I noticed that their cutoff on the filter of the whole synth didn’t go as low as the ones in the Uhe and Softube synths, which seemed to be a deliberate choice on their part. I don’t know if this applies to how they programme synths in general, but I have noticed that characteristic across V collection. This can be a good thing in a way as their synths seem designed to fit into a mix easily but I’ve heard others mention a lack of low end before. I quite like some of their stuff in a mix, and I tend to use the digital emulations (eg; DX7, CS80 etc) the most. Overall it can feel like an uncanny valley sortof analog but sort of digital vibe.

Anyway. Pigments.

I imagine their whole synth universe comes from a unified engine, which would be necessary to make something like Analog Lab work? In there you can play any Arturia synth including Pigments without fully loading it.

As for does it have a sound, I guess it’s like does Phase Plant or Serum have a sound? I know Serum is associated with a scene but it’s pretty flexible and you can do shoegazey weird stuff with it just as much as you can do the dubstep it’s associated with. But again in Serum if you turn on the sub oscillator it has an instant heft to it that can seem harder to access in Pigments. The other thing I’d give to Arturia here is that it’s well priced and constantly updated which is a nice thing to see. But yeah having demoed it and owned it I don’t think it’s one I’d pick up again.

2 Likes
#312

I run a secondary copy of Pigments on my work computer, a 4 year old ThinkPad with 16 RAM that I could only play Poly 4 notes and even that would push resources over 100% on Version 4. Version 5 allows Poly 8 with a little spare resources left over.

Obviously this computer is not ideal, but it is nice to have a usable version of Pigments on work road trips. :happy:

7 Likes
#313

That was a bit my point… I see comparisons to virtual analogs and I should really just look away.

As a mostly hardware forum I think more seem to understand when people expect Hydrasynth to be used for Moog style sounds.

#314

On Mac M1 Pro I have Pigments 5 running but it does throw some resource hogging tantrums occasionally. Ableton Live 11.3 host.

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#315

Holy Shizzle…

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#316

Try messing around with the different filter types as they can sound very different depending on the patch.

#317

Just checking that everyone realises how powerful Pigments is as an fx processor now for any source material/audio you want? Everyone got it? We’re all good?

It’s pretty amazing what you can do with it now. :love_you_gesture:

8 Likes
#318

They’re offering personal deals on Pigments 5; €70 seems like a good deal for what could be a bread and butter synth. I’ve used it before and for someone that scrolls presets and then tweaks instead of going from 0 it is quite the tool!

3 Likes
#319

Pretty cool that you can save your Pigments presets onto Astrolab, ( thread ) and play them natively on that.

This mostly ends the request for a hardware version of Pigments. But of course Astrolab goes way beyond that.

4 Likes
#320

A hardware version of Pigments would be far more knobby than the Astrolabe and far bigger and more comprehensive screen. Probably more along the lines of Waldorf Iridium/Quantum.

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#321

It doesn’t end them, it just derails it… :upside_down_face:

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#322

In a way, the Minifreak was already a simpler hardware version of Pigments.

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#323

The way i would say this – It does end the request for a hardware version. Now it is those wanting improvement, and speculating about that.

#324

Just needs an Iridium-like controller in the form factor of a classic Roland programmer.

#325

Yeah, the Astrolab does have the USB MIDI Host port on the back and the small blank spot on the top deck. No word yet on how much of any of the synth engines can be controlled through MIDI with external controllers.

So we could imagine what MIDI controller supplementing the Astrolab might be right for this.

#326

The idea is one box of hardware with all you need. Not a mishmash of cables and wires and boxes.
Also the screen on the Irridium/Quantum is much bigger than this thing that Arturia released.

Maybe this is a starting point and if it seems to catch on with the customers, maybe there might be a “Pro” version. But this isnt really Pigments in a box so far, no.