NEW GEAR

Arturia Pigments gets souped-up with additive synthesis and extra analog emulations

Arturia’s Pigments combines elements of the French brand’s impressive virtual analog technology with modern tools including wavetable, sample and granular synthesis, a sleek modulation system and a flexible multi-lane sequencer. Pigments’ real highlight though is it ability to house all of these features in a neatly designed and user-friendly interface, all of which makes it a strong contender for our favorite synth plugin on the market right now.

Now version 3 has arrived, adding yet more functionality to the toolset. The headline addition here is the new Harmonic engine type, which adds additive synthesis alongside the existing wavetable, sample and virtual analog generators.

The look and feel of this new section is fairly reminiscent of NI’s excellent Razor, but Arturia’s take has a few unique tricks up its sleeve. Here we get controls to adjust the amount of partials