I bought it on original release. Pigments versions 1-2 had such bad performance on patch switching that while i recognized it as powerful, I never used it much. Version 3 was a little better, started using. Pigments 4 has been fine on my hardware (at the time a 2018 Dell Gaming laptop w Ableton 11 Suite) and has found its way into a number of tracks. If ver 5 is all that much faster that will potentially cause me to evaluate is Serum will still be my #1 goto VST (and 4 is comfortable for me now on my new box, an M2 Max).
Anyway, if you bought it a long time ago and it was slow, I suspect based on 4 being acceptable to me that 5 will be extremely pleasant to use.
iām running pigments 5 in logic on a 2020 macbook air with 8gb and am not noticing any significant change in performance or cpu usage (never really had many issues to begin with)
the presets are more efficently organized and there seems to be some minor (but welcome) ui changes
the generative sequencer is definitely fun and thereās an option to quantize the sequences to scale
iāve built massive haphazard patches in vcv rack to do what pigments now can with just a few clicks / it can pretty much be an ambient bandcamp ep generator
Pigments is so much more than just a āwavetable synthā though. Iāve never had a ton of issues with CPU usage (on a 2020 M1 Macbook Air) but Iām not working on huge projects with multiple instances of Pigments.
Question for pigments owners: is utility engine audio input just an input to the fx section of pigments? Or could the new audio input be routed pre filter, and follow the same signal path as the oscillators?
yes, but it is not gnarly and noisy. if you have a v collection there are some good ones for noisy stuff. you donāt have to take my word for it, just try it.
Yeah, it looks like itās essentially acting like an oscillator in this case and itās going through the whole synth engine. Which means you essentially have unlimited oscillators if you keep routing an instance of pigments into another into another.
Iām excited to try routing audio into this. Recently Iāve been experimenting with using FM to modulate the audio of samples. I think this might enable some really nutso stuff.
I tried Dune 3 in a stunning track that will be hard to beat. It had a kind of fat sound that youād expect from a keyboard, really nice and kind of digital-sounding filter, but what can you do?!
I noticed last time around that this seems to have become their business model for Pigments. They release a new version of the plugin and a new set of premium patches at the same time, and the upgrade is free while the patch expansion gets an intro sale thatās typically not too pricey (while also becoming a bundle sweetener for new customers). Itās almost like a āpay if you wantā upgrade cycle!
