Arturia Pigments 6 – A La Modal
She's a Modal and she's sounding good...
4,9 / 5,0 | 
Pigments 6 Keyboard
Pigments 6 Combi View · Source: Arturia
Pigments 6 Envelopes · Source: Arturia
Pigments 6 Functions · Source: Arturia
Pigments 6 FX · Source: Arturia
Pigments 6 LFO · Source: Arturia
Pigments 6 Play View Light
Pigments 6 Random · Source: Arturia
Pigments 6 Sequencer · Source: Arturia
Arturia’s flagship soft synth returns for its latest iteration, Pigments 6, and introduces a new Modal engine, new filters, a vocoder effect and more!
Table of Contents
Pigments has always been a trailblazer when it comes to powerful software synthesis. It has a huge fanbase that revels in its seemingly endless creative prowess and possibilities. And with Pigments 6, Arturia have further increased its ability to astonish and astound.
So with it already being a formidable sound design and performance tool, what could Arturia possibly bring to it that takes it beyond the last version and warrant that all-important new version number? I asked my friends in Grenoble and their reply was, “Tiens ma bière!“
Pigments 6 – Modally Fantastic
Let’s take a look at what Pigments 6 brings to our sonic palette. The first new feature is the Modal Engine. Modal synthesis is “where a vibrating object is modeled by a bank of damped harmonic oscillators which are excited by an external stimulus.“*
*(Modal Synthesis for Vibrating Objects by Kees van den Doel and Dinesh K. Pai Department of Computer Science University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada)
It’s a form of physical modelling synthesis that specifically relates to objects being struck or scraped or, as Arturia put it, using Collision and Friction. There are two types of objects available in Pigments 6; Beam or String. You can also excite the beam or string via a range of alternative exciters such as a selection of transients or even your own audio input.
Pigments being Pigments, there’s also granular exciters as well as noise and just playing around with each yields amazing and hugely inspirational results! I was wasting hours just flicking through all the possibilities on this engine alone! It’s an exciting alternative to more traditional physical modelling methods.
I’m a big proponent of physical modelling and believe that it is most likely to be the area of synthesis that will see significant leaps in power and capability, and therefore more substantial inclusion in new instruments, in the coming years.
Computing power is now at a point where not a lot of money can buy you a huge amount of performance. So we may finally see physical modelling achieve its full potential in mainstream instruments, something I have been longing for since I bought my KORG Prophecy in 1996!
New Filters
Also new in Pigments 6 are three new filters. The multimode filter has been upgraded to a new version 2. There’s also a brand new Cluster filter, which gives extra movement to your sound, and a LoFi filter for that gritty, gnarliness that still remains very popular.
One can never say that Pigments doesn’t come with enough filters. The sheer number available is staggering by anyone’s reckoning and these new ones bring with them something both useful, unique and eminently usable. The Cluster filter has seven modes to select from and the LoFi filter can really destroy your sounds in a delightful way.
The third big new addition is a Vocoder effect, which ought to be self-explanatory and is yet another welcome string in Pigments already considerable bow. You can feed your own external audio input or any of Pigments 6’s synth engines and get some pretty cool sounds from it.
One would hope that when Astrolab receives its update to accommodate Pigments 6, you can plug a mic directly into the back and feed your own stuff into the filter via that route.
New Modulators and More
There are also new modulators included along with improvements to existing ones, enhancing Pigments powerful feature set even further. Other areas of improvement include a more capable granular engine and a range of UX and UI enhancements, including a light theme for those who crave a bit of a brighter workspace.
In Conclusion
All in all, Pigments 6 brings a fantastic range of enhancements and improvements to what is an already stunning software synthesizer that will please existing users but attract those who have yet to fall under its considerable spell. If you’re still of the mind that Arturia just make great software synth emulations, Pigments will have you reassessing that view substantially!
Once again, Arturia delivers an upgrade worthy of a full version jump. It is, and continues to be, the most amazing and powerful software synth and it has very few peers. For me, only Omnisphere and UVI’s Falcon can stand with it and if you have all three of these in your sonic arsenal, you’re pretty much set.
People often call for a hardware version of Pigments, and for those of you who own Arturia’s Astrolab, you sort of do already, but certainly not in the way you would probably want. I just feel that to cram all of Pigments into a fully useable and intuitive hardware synth would require such compromise with the UI that it would become inherently more difficult to use.
Everything a Software Synth Should Be
In my very humble opinion, Pigments represent the embodiment of that a software synth should be. It is here that, for now anyway, the real benefits of the paradigm lie. To create a hardware synth this powerful, with this many features and functions, would yield an unwieldy behemoth that would exceed the budget and studio space of almost every musician.
Therefore, the best we can hope for, avoiding such financial and real estate pitfalls, the combination of Pigments, Analog Lab Pro and Astrolab is a very elegant and adequate alternative, and one I am finding both rewarding and inspiring. Who knows what the future might bring, but for now I’m content.
For those of you who also use Astrolab, at the time of going to press, Pigments 6 new features aren’t yet supported in Astrolab or Analog Lab Pro, but I fully expect that to change in the very near future.
More Information
Pigments 6 is available to buy now, with free upgrades for existing Pigments owners available via your Arturia account. There is an introductory discount until February 18th!
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