Reviewed: Arturia Pigments 3

First of all, I have to say that Arturia’s Pigments 3 was love at first sight!

It is definitely one of the most versatile VST’s in the market. For the last 6 months, Pigments took over my sound design workflow as the possibilities are truly limitless and version 3 is just blowing my mind.

Something you won’t see every day on a VST is a combination of 3 oscillators analog-style engine, wavetable, sample playback with granular synthesis capabilities and now with the latest upgrade the harmonic engine for additive synthesis and a third utility engine.

The Harmonic engine is without a doubt the biggest feature of the upgrade, allowing users to control a combination of sine waves adding up to 512 partials for richer sounds. You can also customise odd and even harmonics and morph from A to B of the wide variety of filter shapes.

The new Utility engine counts with a fourth oscillator and 2 sample-based noise generators. Although the amount of noises is quite large there’s no option to import your own noise samples, which could make things a lot more fun.

64 wavetables were included to make a total of 164 in its library plus the possibility of importing your own.

A multi-band compressor and a pitched delay are new features of the effects section. The Chorus Jun-6 (Roland Juno-6 emulation) and the BL-20 Flanger (Bel BF-20) can bring ease to the “vintage sound lovers” in times of modern sound design. Not only that, Arturia added its own Jup-8 V4’s (Roland Jupiter-6) low-pass filter and either filter 1 or 2 now can be routed to either FX bus A or B.

Extra points to Arturia for adding in-app tutorials plus the video tutorials on their website. I wish every VST had such an easy way to learn them.

For holders of version 2, the new upgrade is FREE but for newcomers Pigments 3 is available here with 50% discount of its original price for £84.95 and you can choose between DriveShaper or Dubstation 2 for free.