Pigments: First Impressions

[gregwalton42]

As an electronic engineer who started designing and building synths back in the 70s (before CEM/SSM chips!) I'd like to congratulate Arturia on Pigments. I'm a long-time lover/user of Korg Wavestations and always hoped Arturia would add something like it to their synth collection - but something more ergonomic.

I'm delighted you have used the considerable talents of your engineers to come up with such a good-looking, relatively easy-to-use, great-sounding and powerful synth. I love that the screen presence is so like the V Collection, that the modulation is so comprehensive and beautifully laid out and that it is so easy and logical to assign controllers.

My only concerns are that, personally, I'm (mostly) not blown away by the presets, there isn't (as far as I can tell) explicit support for MPE and that the pricing isn't competitive with Serum. Serum has a large ecosystem and is $189, Pigments will be €199. Hmm.

Will I buy Pigments? Well, the €168 offer with V Collection 6 is tempting me... 

[Smedia]

My only concerns are that, personally, I'm (mostly) not blown away by the presets,

Same here.
To be heretic, it sounds massively like a synth from another company.
Mess, if I was able to re-create a lot of pigment's presets

Switch off the internal effects and the barebone of pigments is not that great.
But anyway, it is a very good synth!

[Funtmaster]

Switch off the internal effects and the barebone of pigments is not that great.
But anyway, it is a very good synth!
[/quote]

I would disagree with that statement. I have spent some tine now creating patches from scratch and in my experience have found the sounds without FX to be very rich. I tend to add FX in the later stages of creating a patch and try to resist the tendency to add FX "just because they are there". Indeed, I often find myself removing some FX I have added as they don't make the patch any better.