Arturia Pigments 3 (DOWNLOAD)

General

This is not your average softsynth: this is a sound-designer's treat that does things really, really well. A virtual synthesizer of breathtaking depth, Arturia Pigments 3 comes so packed with sound sources and modulation options, and offers such a smooth and clear interface to navigate it all, that you might as well clear the schedule for the rest of the week.

Arturia Pigments 3: The Engines

The foundation is formed by a meaty stack of engines. The Harmonic engine gives you additive synthesis with up to 512 parts and can be manipulated using a range of methods to take it to a super high level. The Wavetable engine boasts over 160 waveforms as well as custom waves which can be imported at will, where they can be contorted in every thinkable way, and where you can even morph from waveform to waveform. The virtual analogue engine will probably be the most familiar to any entry-level sound-designer, while the Sample engine focusses on granular synthesis and offers the option to work with both built-in and custom samples. To finish, the Utility Engine handles the noise, and provides countless timbres as well as an incredibly diverse selection of noise-shaping tools.

More Sound-Design

While the hefty list of engines take care of the sound sources, the oscillators add the colour. Of course, you're going to need more, like filters, LFOs, envelopes, and effects, and of course, all of it is supplied in abundance. You can pretty much modulate every parameter with whatever you want, which should immediately underline how extremely versatile Pigments 3 is. Then there's the effects section: two busses and a send bus with the option to combine up to three effects per bus. And the choice of effects is brain-breaking! A virtual sweety-shop stacked with everything from reverb to delay, from chorus to distortion, and from tape echo to equalization. Four new flavours have also been thrown in: a pitch-shift delay, a BL-20 flanger, an emulation of the Juno-6 chorus, and a multi-band compressor. In short, this is an extremely extensive softsynth that offers more than enough for the experienced sound-designer to sink their teeth into, and the less experienced to play around and get dirty.