So why has it taken this long to develop a software synth of its own creation? 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. As a software developer myself I feel ripped off when I see an expensive product cutting corners like this.Pigments is a surprising first for Arturia. If you have $200 to spend on a synth better go with Zebra. Honestly I would not recommend Pigments at full price. It's a forum from like from 20 years ago with unreadable captchas and such. I reported the bugs to their forum which is just a hideous experience. These things are not the end of the world, but it's simply not the level of polish I'd expect from a $199 synth in 2020. I know some people like those things but I wish there was a setting to turn them off. I find the colorful animations of the modulators quite distracting. If you turn off the bus the effects still look like they are working, no indication in the UI other than a little on/off switch of the bus. For example the effects are grouped into buses. It almost feels like they are using a web browser to render the UI. The UI engine is kinda weird, not sure what they are using but it feels kinda laggy compared to other synths. There are also some annoying clicks when playing legato notes in mono. It always renders in low DPI with blurry text and graphics regardless of the window size. For example scaling on Windows 10 with a 4K monitor doesn't work. I played with it for an hour and already bumped into a couple of bugs. The CPU meter on Ableton Live only went up to about 30% so it seems efficient. The modulation options are very nice and powerful.ĬPU usage seems high when opening a single instance, but I did a little superficial benchmark and ran about 50 instances of Pigments. The filter options are great which is something I've missed from Hive. Everything sounds modern, clean, and precise. It's very Arturia, for a lack of a better word.

So it turns out I had the $69 offer too so I jumped in and bought Pigments 2.

Pigments 2 synth