Sound Explorers Collection 2

I love these plug-ins. They fill a major gap in my studio. They're familiar and easy to use out of the gate, but there's a ton of added features the deeper you dig. My favorite flanger I've used, hands down.

Often, I need a harmonic processor to add extra liveliness and presence in a sound that might not have been recorded with enough of that information. Bus Exciter adds just the right edge and is tweakable in super musical and straight forward ways. This will see a lot of use here. Great job, guys!

They sound GREAT, are easy to use and the Software Center is the best one out there! This morning, when I booted Pro-Tools a message popped up and said updates for Arturia plug-ins are available. If only all manufacturer's did this. Keep up the GREAT work!

As soon as I open my DAW, I load it up—it's part of my routine. It sounds amazing, and the workflow makes it super easy to jam and create spontaneously.

It offers a wealth of inspiring sounds. I’m never short of ideas when I dive into Pure LoFi.

Pigments is quite flexible, and quite frankly I'm really fond of the possibilities of the wavetable engine: exponential FM, linear FM, the multiple phase modulation modes, same for phase distortion and wavefolding. Combined with the countless modulation capabilities with the LFO, envelopes, functions and so on, it's perfect for what I like! I love the "Highlight" feature: it's perfect for beginners to see which parameters will have the biggest impact on the sound, but also when I design patches for a track, I add tips and reminders for myself… ‘remember to tweak that when you'll be arranging the track’. That way, a few weeks later, when you do the arrangement, you can still remember what you had in mind when designing the track.

While I had some specific sounds in mind when creating my Pigments presets, I also let myself "float and follow" when discovering the wavetable engine, and sometimes it was more about finding a nice preset around a particular, unique feature

While learning Pigments and experimenting with various parameters, I quickly honed in on my favorite feature: the wave table editor. I always begin my synthesis work by crafting the wave unit first and work my way out from there. With Pigments, you can quickly get the tones and harmonics you need with it’s powerful features. I love using the different noise modulators in combination with simpler wave shapes to create realistic sounding instrument timbres.

My approach usually involves deciding on a theme and building the sounds around it. On new synths I like to explore possibilities and experiment to find a certain niche. With my 32 Pigments presets, I created a broad range of challenging tonal and musical pallets, and felt Pigments did a great job of meeting those challenges.

I find the instrument to be very intuitive and visually beautiful to work with. All the new features and sounds are just amazing. I mostly got hooked on the noise engines as the colors of the noises were so soothing to me and sounding organic and natural. Sub oscillator is a welcoming add, it has a routing choice too. I also loved to play with the formant section of the harmonic oscillator engines, it lets you mould the spectrum. Jup-8 filter adds class, the multi-band compressor performs amazing and the pitch shift delay adds an extra kick in the SFX territory. The attack is faster than the blink of an eye. Combining the three engines you really get a powerful sonic tool!

As this was the first time creating sound design with Pigments, I just dug in and learned all the features exploring their possibilities. I aimed to create sounds that were given in the brief and also go for my favorite styles. My sounds turned out as classic sounding evolving leads, lo-fi and retro leads, as well as cutting edge basses and sequences. My method was to include the new features, other than that I fully went with my creativity

It is hard to say what is my favorite preset, their styles vary so much! Most fun when making sounds to me is to think about a movie scene or a concrete situation where I would use a particular sound, and then I just shape it until I get the feeling it would be perfect for the scene or the mood. This experimental sound could accompany a cartoon character from the future or a motion graphic design. I named it after a past fav radio show - 'Fine Time'. I wanted to make a combination of the new featured Harmonic oscillator and the noise engines, checking the filter routing split option. I couldn't have imagined this versatile sound in the beginning, so it was an experimental approach. Fine Time preset is based on the new Pigments 3 features - two new Harmonic oscillator engines and two noise engines. One harmonic engine gives the warm melodic base, the second engine adds the bass sound, whilst the noise engines put in the rawness and the gritty texture, you can play with all the layers using macros, try out the mod wheel too. What is also cool with this sound is that it is versatile due to the arpeggio styles and speeds. All rounded up with a sliding cutoff touch of the new Jup-8 filter. Takes me to a sonic fantasy world!