SequencerĪnd rounding it all off is the visually dull but awesomely powerful arpeggiator/sequencer. Choose from 14 of the usual effects (including a good bit of wavefolding and bitcrushing) to fill up to 9 slots and process the heck out of your sound. Two insert busses and a send bus each with 3 inserts form the overly comprehensive effects section. Rounding off the main page are 4 Macro knobs which you can assign to any combination of parameters. Whatever’s going on is always on show and animated and you can get in and edit every aspect of whatever modulation engine suits your purpose. And what’s brilliant about the modulation section is how wonderfully it’s visualised. Choose from Turing, Sample & Hold or Binary for all your random needs. If that’s not interesting enough then how about combining a couple of modulators to form some new and slightly bonkers ones? Or sod all that and go with randomisation.
There are 3 regular LFOs but there are also 3 function generators, 3 envelopes, you can tie in velocity, expression, keyboard and aftertouch. You can use pretty much everything to modulate anything. That’s the top half of the screen, the bottom half is all about modulation. You can run two filters together in various routings. There’s the SEM, Mini, Matrix 12, Surgeon, Comb, Phaser, Formant and Multimode. There are 8 filter models covering all the sorts of filters Arturia has encountered in their travels. You can tune and mix the oscillators independently and even throw in some tuning drift to keep things authentic. On the analog side you have 3 oscillators with our regular 4 waveforms of sine, triangle, saw and pulse, with width modulation. Not sure what they do? Don’t worry, just turn up the amount and enjoy the sound and the movement in the neon style waveform display. You can then morph or step through the position, build up voices of unison in classic or chord modes and then totally mess with the waveform via FM, Phase Modulation, Phase Distortion and Wave Folding. On the Wavetable side there are loads and loads of wavetables for you to play with. It has 2 sound engines that you run together in parallel. However, Pigments has some tricks up its sleeves and a powerful way of tackling the complexity of modulation that makes the workflow really quite exciting. It’s a bold statement in an era where we are awash with awesome synthesis with more fabulous sounding presets than we would ever have the time to try. Arturia says that it can sound like other synths (for sure) but no other synth can sound like Pigments. Pigments combines a big wavetable synthesizer with all the virtual analog stuff they’ve been doing all this time.
Well, I was right about it being a super duper software synth.
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