Trying to choose: Ana2, Serum, Pigments2... Help! :D

[nIGhT-SoN]

I would suggest to go with Serum. It has one of the best interfaces that makes it one of the easiest synths to get what you want and the cherry on the top you get lifetime updates, that means when Serum 2 will get out, you'll get it for free. Besides that, support you get is top notch, Steve answers himself and pretty fast.

LE: If it helps you out, you can get it through Splice, with rent to own.

[kingozrecords]

I find many of the patches for Ana 2 have little spanning, they seemed to use keyboard spanning as a copout and many presets only have a few notes. It's quite annoying; but obviously spanning is a nice feature (that shouldn't be a crutch).

I would give pigments more of a try if it has nice function and isn't so CPU hungry as serum. The strength of Serum is preset count. If pigments has more than 10,000 available cheaply then it's worth it; otherwise a waste of time if you're a musician that doesn't have the time to program like a designer.

[Tannaliini]

You ruled out quite a few of my personal preferred options (Hive, Avenger, Dune 3, Icarus, and maybe Rapid). Nothing is wrong with that, taste is personal, means we have different sound aesthetic tastes.


... since we seem to have different tastes of what sounds good, who knows.
[/quote]

I actually liked the sound of Hive & Dune, just didn’t like the visual aspect of those synths. Where in Serum & Ana I like the sound & the interface (not sure if their sounds are superior - or if any synth really has superior sounds, just maybe different sound palette).

[zvenx]

At the end of the day you have to decide what is best for your workflow and creativity .

rsp

[RexBanner]

Pigments 2 tends to have less EDM presets.

[jeffb01]

hmmm. This is really a tough one. Pigments is probably my all-time favorite synth. On the other hand, Serum is so great and fast. I recently bought ANA but really haven't explored it.

Here's a few pros and cons to each.
Buy Serum if:
1. You want to make your own wavetables (Serum crushes Pigments here)
2. If CPU is a concern
3. You want to buy lots of great presets
4. You want lots of great tutorials online (YouTube)
5. You want an FX processor (Serum comes with Serum FX, which is like serum without the oscs, that you can use in your fx section.

Buy Pigments if:
1. A nice Arp/Sequencer is important to you
2. You like to go nuts on the modulating (stuff like modulating the shape of an lfo, lots of random modulators, etc)
3. You want to do basic VA synthesis. In fairness, they are both good at this, but using the VA engine, I can get some thick Moog-like sounds for sure.
4. You like seeing everything that is happening - they both have great GUIs, but Pigments is maybe the best ever.
5. You want to use is as a sampler or granular synth sometimes - (Pigments crushes Serum in the sampler dept)
6. You have a good cpu or don't mind bouncing a lot.

Just typing this out made me think Serum is probably for you, but I really, really like pigments.

[zvenx]

Interesting. On your system, Serum uses less cpu than Pigments 2?
rsp

[dune_rave]

imho serum is better than pigments. another synth i rather like: icarus2.
i haven't used the granular and sampler parts of pigments that much, so those features mean nothing to me.
And one more comment: if someone uses plugin synths years ago, there's no need to see everything on the gui, like in pigments.
i rather like how u-he implemented such things in hive2: you can display 4 chosen modulation, but you don't have to see them each time. Several users would like pigments with an on/off switch for the gui animation...

[voidhead23]

If you roll your own patches, demo each one for a whole day and make a bunch of your own sounds. Whichever one has a user folder full of presets you're really happy with after those three days, buy that one. If you're mainly a preset person, that's fine, but makes it a little harder. Sort of. Pick the one with the nicest GUI, or the one your favorite artists use. Pretty much every synth is amazing these days and can make incredible music.

[Tannaliini]

I find many of the patches for Ana 2 have little spanning, they seemed to use keyboard spanning as a copout and many presets only have a few notes. It's quite annoying; but obviously spanning is a nice feature (that shouldn't be a crutch).

I usually turn the arp or chord things totally off in Ana2 when browsing the presets. This way I can hear just the sound + how it works with the melody line I made. But sometimes these Ana2's arps + chords can give interesting ideas - so time to time they can be even useful.

If you roll your own patches, demo each one for a whole day and make a bunch of your own sounds. Whichever one has a user folder full of presets you're really happy with after those three days, buy that one. If you're mainly a preset person, that's fine, but makes it a little harder. Sort of. Pick the one with the nicest GUI, or the one your favorite artists use. Pretty much every synth is amazing these days and can make incredible music.

I used to think that I could not create my own sounds - but after playing especially with Serum I've noticed I can make at least SOME sounds on my own I think I will still rely on ready made presets + tutorials (so in that scenario I think Serum would be the option since as mentioned also in this thread Serum seems to have many tutorials on youtube + many sound expansions available if needed).

When I very first started trying out the Serum demo, I thought "nope, I would never buy so expensive synth that has only 2 oscs" But damn, I am really starting to love Serum's sound + easiness to use/make sounds with it.

[mdstudio]

The oscillators in Serum are very powerful. You can resample the sound to an oscillator, which frees up the other oscillator for adding more complexity.

As for the price, you can use Splice and pay $10/month until it's paid off with no interest.