Arturia has been relentless over the last few year with updating and improving its instruments. Whether that’s firmware upgrades for its hardware or feature dumps for its plugins. Pigments, the company’s all original virtual synth (as opposed to its meticulous emulations of classic hardware), has been one of the biggest benefactors of these free updates. Today the company is launching Pigments 3.5 another significant upgrade to what I have said repeatedly is my favorite soft synth at the moment.
While this isn’t quite as large an update as 3.0, it still brings a lot of new features to the table. One of the one most important is that Pigments 3.5 adds compatibility with Apple’s M1 chips. This isn’t exactly a flashy new feature, but it will make many producers very happy who have already jumped on the hype train for the latest MacBooks.
The biggest change to the synth engine itself is probably the addition of a cross modulation feature. You can use either engine one or two as the mod source and dial in results that range from subtle weirdness to full on sonic freak outs. Arturia also fleshed out its comb filter which has three new modes (LP6, BP6 and HP6) that cleans up certain frequencies excelling at plucks and bowed sounds.
Arturia also added a new distortion module to the effects section. While there have been options for adding dirt in Pigments before, this is a lot more versatile of an option. It has 16 different modes with built-in filtering for creating everything from the germanium fuzz of classic guitar pedals, to extreme digital wavefolding or even the soft saturation you’d get from a vintage preamp.
And if that’s not enough new sound design options for you, there are dozens of new wavetables being added too, plus over 150 new presets that show off the power of the new features.
Lastly, Arturia made some tweaks to the UI that should streamline the workflow, including one-click sample preview.
Pigments 3.5 is available now as a free upgrade for current owners. If you haven’t picked up Pigments yet, now is a pretty good time to, since it’s on sale for $99 until January 6th. And Arturia is even including three new sound banks for free — Bass Thermal, Trap Chemical and EDM Kinetic.
All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
For all the latest Technology News Click Here
For the latest news and updates, follow us on Google News.
