April 20th, 2021
Terrence O Brien / Engadget
I haven t been shy about declaring Arturia s Pigments as my favorite soft synth out there right now. It was great when it was originally announced in 2018. And the free, massive upgrade to Pigments 2 in December of 2019 secured it a place on my must have list. Now Arturia is issuing another huge update Pigments 3 that adds a new synth engine, a new waveform for its virtual analog engine, 64 new wavetables, a new utility engine, four new effects and a bunch of other enhancements. And, just like Pigments 2, it s free for current owners.
For the uninitiated, Pigments is basically Arturia s answer to super synths like Native Instruments Massive or Xfer s Serum. It features a virtual analog engine, a wavetable engine, sample playback with granular synthesis features and now a harmonic engine for additive synthesis. It allows you to combine any two of those, and then manipulate the result with an almost endless number of modulation opti