Rolling Pigments 3 Tips & Trix

Splitting off from the VST thread since it seems like so many people are going to messing around with this, might be nice to have a little sound design diary thread:
VST freebies & cheapies, what do you like?

I watched those videos posted in the other thread along with some others, like this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8xCP8AOfBU

The 50 min one in particular was really good, I wasn't sure what the Function modulators did and those seem really powerful. I was underestimating the analog engine too, since it seemed like the most trad out of all the options, but he gets some nice sounds.

I'm not convinced about the Harmonic engine on its own yet, it sounds kinda dinky to me without adding a bunch of compression and fx, when compared to Razor. But I do love putting samples from Razor in the Sampler engine.

Next I want to mess around with the wavetables, especially loading in your own samples to create wavetables, seems like that has a ton of potential.

Also the sequencer and arp seem really fun, this might be the first sequencer that I actually use (I'm used to just programming the midi manually, but the probability and random aspects are very appealing).

Whoa, so that's what the 'Polyrhythm' part of the sequencer does (via the last part of the video posted by Moodles). Not what I expected and my mind is kinda blown.

good job jordan!

from the vst thread:

I definitely feel like I need to learn some basic sound design concepts. I can come up with something kind of cool just by tinkering, turning knobs, and linking things together, but I wish I actually knew how to dial up a specific at will.

― Muad'Doob (Moodles), Tuesday, 23 November 2021 23:09 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

moodles: red means recording made a good video about basic sound design using pigments:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vM-sZQAFDo

ha, I just watched this one yesterday

Ah good stuff - and you probably saw that jeremy had some other good pigments stuff on his channel as well.

Pigments sequencer starting to make wish that all my other stuff had that level of functionality on it

Very glad to see this thread & a thriving ILX Pigments community. I'm hoping to catch up with all the stuff posted so far during the next week. Good luck, everyone! :)

Unlike a lot of VSTs I bought over the pandemic the UI on this encourages and rewards fucking around and finding out.

made some good yoga-class-on-a-space-station vibes today, the interface looks so fuckin nice when you have a zillion modulators modulating

the arp/sequencer is terrific, usually i have a zillion randomizing effects and M4L devices going to create movement in my lazy soundscapes, way more fun to dial it in here

Another video on the arp/sequencer, here. Feeding MIDI control into multiple instances of Pigments (or any synth I s'pose) opens lots of possibilities for sound design. I'm realizing this is how I can get a blend of differently programmed layers, like I do with the Dune 3 VST—fading in an arpeggiated sequence under a sustained pad chord sounds amazing at just the right moment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0rSIbJ696U

Cool! I can't wait to mess around with this (with a patch that actually sounds good, lol).

One of these videos mentioned an undo function within Pigments, which sounds absolutely amazing since I've definitely lost some patches that I haven't been able to recreate, but I haven't been able to find it (or any documentation about it)?

I'm wondering if the reason I've found the additive synth engine kinda chintzy sounding, as someone mentioned elsewhere, might be cause by my unfamiliarity with it. So I'm hoping to dig into this mode of synthesis more generally and see if that hypothesis holds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCujIf5eJ2w

V3.5 just launched:
https://www.musicradar.com/news/arturia-pigments-3-5-synth-plugin

(main news is cross modulation between engines)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOGWVvlpqyU

This sounds like a really cool update

Yeah, it needed more features. :P

Cool! I made an acid track with the sequencer the other day, really fun.

stoked!!

ayyy https://musictech.com/features/awards/best-soft-synth-2021/

So I was trying to record the midi output of the Pigments sequencer so that I could use it to control my Reface CP, but for the life of me couldn't get it to appear as a midi input on a midi track.

Forum sleuthing says that maybe it just doesn't work with the VST3 version, and I can't be bothered to get a VST2 version installed just for this. So my new solution is to multi-sample my keyboard and use velocity to control which sample is triggered, and do it all within Pigments. So while it would be incredibly convenient if the midi out worked, it's also cool that Pigments is flexible enough to do this alternate solution that wouldn't work in most other plugins.

Funny story, I sampled my Rhodes sounds, but no matter what I did there was some sort of crystallizer-sounding arpeggiation happening on top of the basic sound. I turned off every single function in Pigments except for the basic sampler, I even read the manual, and it kept happening, it was driving me crazy.

It turned out the solution is that I'm a complete idiot, and I had a Pigments arpeggiator unmuted when I recorded my original samples (so it was baked into each sample).

ahhah, late reply but Jordan I salute you. I wish my life wasn't turned upside-down TWICE in the past month. Things will be fine, but I've been wish for a better space and more time to similarly critically fuck up in Pigments as well.

Commendable that your troubleshooting took you as far as reading the manual, heh. I got partway thru it... Were there any especially spicy sections of reading that you'd recommend?

*been wishing* fuck i'm tired

The sequencer section was worthwhile, although it's relatively intuitive. Although it's slightly annoying that when using a custom scale, you always have to enter the notes in C, but nbd.

Still need to mess around a lot more with modulation and wavetable stuff. I find the fx section oddly inscrutable, I usually just turn it off and use external fx.

While going through some of the presets, I learned a fun alternative way to build unusual and morphing sequences using a sample and the function curve.

1. Choose a sample with a tone you like
2. Turn on Granular and set Size: Time to a shorter duration depending on how long you want each step to go
3. Set Dens: to Sync mode and choose the rate of your sequence
4. Under TUNE, set Q to on and use the little pencil button to select a scale you like
5. Draw or choose a Function curve and assign it to the TUNE Coarse knob, make sure the Function is set to Loop or Run mode
6. You can use the Function Rate knob to control how quickly it cycles through the sequence
7. The Function Scale knob can be used to modulate the Function, which changes up your pattern. If you assign and LFO to the Scale knob, you end up with an endlessly modulating sequence.

to add some fun texture, use a wavetable as your 2nd engine. Apply the same Function to the Position knob. Then apply a square wave LFO to the wavetable Volume set to the same Sync rate as your sample.

Ooh I'm going to try this

Anyone mess around with the cross-engine modulation in 3.5 yet?

Ok I did, and it is easy to use and very fun.

There was a page on the Arturia site that explained CrossMod very simply, which has now been deleted for some reason. But basically you go to Modulation (lower right of the main panel for each engine) and can select Engine 2, and you get different options for each engine type.

A frequent Pigments experience is happening upon something that instantly sounds great (like choosing a wavetable as a modulation source and the default wavetable sounding perfect), but feeling like I should be exploring all my options first. But then often it's hard to beat that first thing, and hopefully I've saved it properly. Trying to embrace those moments and not overthinking something that works.

There are a stupid amount of wavetables, and so many of them sound similar to me. Scrolling through them all to find the best one just isn't happening. I have similar issues with presets. Just give something that's close to what I want, and then I can tweak until I'm all the way there.

Word. Also I always thought any sample wav could be used as a custom wavetable, and apparently they can...not.

Moodles, you are a genius.

It's a very clever way of building a sequencer within Pigments without using the sequencer. I'm not sure yet if it has advantages over using the sequencer, but it has its own flavor (and wait, what if I controlled the evolving Sampler engine WITH the sequencer, maybe at a much slower rate?).

definitely not something I invented, just uncovered it while digging through presets. I'm guessing there's a ton of interesting stuff like this in there.

Ah cool, did you reverse engineer it from a preset? That can be tricky sometimes (following all the modulation).

I'm making a track in the mold of the intro to Billy Cobham's 'Stratus' with sequence and drum solo, with more interesting synths and worse drumming.

yes, exactly, figured this out by digging into the preset to figure out how it worked, and then built on that to try a few other things

Pigments 4 out now!

https://cdm.link/2022/12/new-in-arturia-pigments-4-soft-synth/

Not quite as huge an update as version 3, but I do like the drag and drop modulators and other UI improvements.

Pigments 5 out now!
https://cdm.link/2024/01/arturia-pigments-5-hands-on/

Downloaded earlier, but I haven't really had a chance to see what's new with it