Review: Arturia Pigments Software Synthesizer

Pigments is a surprising first for Arturia. The company ostensibly built a reputation on its realistic software recreations of vintage synthesisers, and it’s carved out a name for itself in the hardware synth realm with the Brute collection. So why has it taken this long to develop a software synth of its own creation?

Perhaps because it already has a wealth of ‘flavours’ covered in its V Collection series, Pigments is less about mastering a particular style of synthesis and more about giving the modern creative a ridiculous range of options. Having spent a little while with Pigments, it certainly takes the cake as Arturia’s most impressive all-in-one synth instrument.

You’d be forgiven if you felt a little overwhelmed the first time you laid eyes on Pigments. It’s a busy GUI with all manner of waves, colours and shapes poking through. So, let’s break it down in a orderly fashion.

At the very top of the instrument are the global controls, as per Arturia’s V Collection instruments. Here, you can enter a preset and performance view with minimal visual distractions, or use the drop-down menus to the right to select presets by type or alphabetical order. Further along are the global views — Synth, FX and Seq — to access the different layers of Pigments. There’s a handy Master level knob perched top right, just before the MIDI controller configuration view.

START YOUR ENGINES

Pigments’ sound is generated by two Engines which sit top left of the instrument. Both of these are switchable between Analog and Wavetable modes. Setting an engine to Analog reveals three oscillators with four wave types each, plus a noise generator. The Wavetable option contains tons of available wavetables categorised into Natural, Processed, Synthesizers, etc.

Losing yourself in the Wavetable menus doesn’t take much effort. There are all kinds of textures to be found, organised neatly enough for quick discovery and with a large central window to display the shape. Once your wavetable is selected, the Engine tab provides a number of ways to manipulate it further: Tune (Fine or Coarse), Frequency Modulate (Linear or Exponential), Phase Modulate (Key, Mod Osc, Self or Random), Phase Distort, Wave Fold and more. The Unison section has both Chord and Classic modes, letting you add up to eight voices. With stereo and detune controls, it’s a great way to thicken things up.

FILTERS

Moving east of the Engines, we arrive at Pigments’ two Filter sections. With a plethora of options, some of these filters model hardware synth variants like the Oberheim SEM and Minimoog. By default, most of the patches assign the Mod Wheel of your MIDI controller to the filter cutoff.

Heading south now, the most striking visual feature of Pigments is its long, colourful strip of 23 labeled blocks that runs right through its centre. These exist to give you an at-a-glance read on everything that’s going on in your synth sound. The first block is Velocity and the little purple line jumps up and down in real-time depending on how hard you hit a note. The graphs in the LFO blocks oscillate constantly to the wave they’re set to. The final four blocks display the level of each Macro.

When you click on the block’s label it turns the strip into a window where you can assign a parameter to that particular function. For example, if I click on Env 2 I can then click and drag the contour ring around virtually any knob in the instrument (it’ll light up the same colour as the modulator you’re assigning it to) to set the range to which the Envelope 2 shape will affect that parameter; let’s say the Wavetable Position knob.