It’s hard to believe Artruria has anything more to add at this point, but here we are. NAMM 2024 is about to begin and Arturia is launching the fifth version of its homegrown super synth. In the grand scheme of things, this is one. But that’s not to say there aren’t new features to be excited about.
Perhaps the most important new feature is also the least visible. Pigments finally supports multi-core processing, significantly improving performance. It’s never been the biggest resource hog in the world of virtual synths (the current champ is, in my experience), but depending on the patch it can be quite demanding. Now, when my M1 MacBook Pro is idle, the standalone version’s CPU usage is about 4%. I rarely see it climb above 20%.
The Lite version also has some changes. Now there’s a new spectral visualization tool that’s more consistent and beautiful. It doesn’t really change things in any real way, and while I admit the main user interface can seem a bit busy for newbies, I never found it particularly difficult to navigate. Playback view may be a welcome improvement for those who use Paint in performance settings and rarely do in-depth sound design, but I found myself never switching to it.
If you’re not a sound design expert and rely more on presets, you might appreciate the 150 new presets included, not to mention the three new sound banks, each containing 150 patches, all of which were designed to Consider MPE’s. Pigments is one of the few high-profile soft synths with a wide range of features, but its presets are often underutilized. But now it’s becoming more common, and Arturia is working to fix it. Heck, maybe Arturia will announce its own MPE controller in the near future.
One of the more exciting upgrades is the new option for audio input in the utility engine (only on the second source). This means you can use paint effects on other instruments and even your voice. You most likely already have access to a rich effects suite in your DAW, but being able to seamlessly combine external audio with Pigments’ synthesis engine and process it through the same effects helps them blend together more seamlessly, This is a great source of new sounds. I tested it running Elektron Digitone through Pigments and was very pleased with the results, but I definitely still have a lot of exploring to do. If you’d rather stick with the built-in engine, there’s also a selection of new samples and wavetables for you to explore.
The sequencer also got some pretty significant upgrades. There is a new dice icon for generating random sequences that can be locked to a specific ratio. Sequences can now be saved individually as their own presets, and you can lock them to try out the same sequence with multiple different sound presets. You can even feed MIDI from Pigments’ sequencer to other instruments. So if your DAW or synthesizer of choice lacks generation capabilities, you can now let Pigments do the work.
As always, Pigments 5 is available as a free upgrade for current owners. If you haven’t tried it yet, now is a great time. For a limited time, you can purchase the paint along with three new paints for $99. This is pretty cheap, as the Pigments are normally $199 and the full price for each soundbank ( , , and ) is $30 .
This article was originally published on Engadget: https://www.engadget.com/arturia-pigments-5-adds-generative-sequencing-and-external-audio-processing-201014331.html?src=rss
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