You also get a new bank of sound designer presets. Arturia brought these over from its standalone effects offerings. You’ll also find two new modulation effects in Pigments 3, the BL-20 Flanger and Chorus Jun 6. Also new is the Multiband Compressor, which allows you to selectively compress three user-selectable bands, providing a new level of sonic control. It lets you apply pitch shifting to the delay taps for creating some really cool effects. Read more Product of the Week: Empirical Labs Arousor Rev 3. Speaking of effects, Version 3 also brings with it several new effects for its already stocked effects section. In the filter department, Pigments 3 debuts a new Low Pass filter and now allows you to route filters to the various effects buses. The overview video on the Arturia site describes them as ranging from “mellow and bell-like to more harsh and buggy.” With Pigments 3, Arturia beefed up the Wavetable Engine with 64 new wavetables. The Utility Engine, which includes an additional oscillator and noise sample layers, can be used with any sound to make it richer or used on its own as a sound source.

The Harmonic Engine is additive synthesis–based and brings in even more sonic variety.

These augment the three carried over from Pigments 2: Wavetable, Sample and Granular, and Virtual Analog. Two new synthesis engines have been added: the Harmonic Engine and the Utility Engine. This synth, which comes in plug-in and standalone formats, offers a robust feature set-expanded in some significant ways in Pigments 3-and a variety of synth engines to mix and match. Arturia describes the newly released Pigments 3 as a “Polychrome Software Synthesizer,” meaning, according to the simple concept, that Pigments produces a wide range of synthesis colors.Īs soon as I heard some of the demos Arturia posted on the Pigments 3 Resource Page, and then got a chance to play it, it all made sense.