Pigments 5 redundant if i have Falcon 3 and VPS Avenger?

[DrGonzo]

Well, it’s not marketed or designed as a Diva style plugin, and if that’s what you’re after, of course there are better choices. It’s a digital or hybrid style instrument and maybe you just don’t like it, but I’ve never really found it unsuited to provide bass or any other type of sound, though it’s a lot of synth just to get a basic bass sound and I’m more likely to choose a simpler plugin for a simpler sound.

I don't think you understood what I meant. I think Pigments is a great synth. I find every part of it to be outstanding, the effects, the routing, especially the granular engine which has some of the most coolest tools that can be synced in fantastic ways. Although the sample library that it comes with Pigments is limited, it has a great scope from cool foley sounds, to electric mayhem and acoustic instruments.

The only thing I don't give two thumbs up for is the internal VA/synth engine, which I find absolutely acceptable. But it's not in the same quality level as Avenger. Or Diva. Or Repro.

If Arturia would bring in the oscillators from their analog emulations for a future update, Pigments would be close to perfection. Since they already added many filters from their analog synths, I can't see why they wouldn't add oscillators from Moog, Roland, Oberheim, Korg etc.

And the fact that every update of Pigments so far have been free is just amazing.

/C

[teilo]

I would vote for Pigments alone for its MPE friendliness. In Falcon it needs a script to implement MPE into a sound, which sometimes clashes with another script. Does Avenger support MPE? As far as I know it doesn’t. Its on sale now also, I am wondering if its worth it, having Halion, Pigments and Falcon already… I guess not, as it does not support MPE!

Avenger doesn't even support PolyAT. By the time V2 came out, I had a Seaboard Rise, a Hydrasynth, and now an S61 mk3. I'm not spending money on any "super synth" that doesn't do MPE, or at minimum PolyAT. But a unlike me, a lot of people don't use synths for performance. So this may no matter to them.

I've had Falcon for a while. There are technical ways to do MPE patches, but they are not worth the work, since you need to create layers that respond to each channel to pull it off. Not worth the effort.

Pigments on the other hand just works. The workflow is fantastic. Ignore all the "sounds like plastic crap" comments. That's just BS, and likely based on preset surfing. It has great oscs, fantastic filters and plenty of warmth. I'll go so far to say that if Pigments is "cold and digital sounding" then you would have to make this claim about every Arturia VA synth, because they share a common architecture, and even a lot of the same filters.

[Tj Shredder]

So we could turn around their moto. The only synth you will never need…

[liquidsound]

I would vote for Pigments alone for its MPE friendliness. In Falcon it needs a script to implement MPE into a sound, which sometimes clashes with another script. Does Avenger support MPE? As far as I know it doesn’t. Its on sale now also, I am wondering if its worth it, having Halion, Pigments and Falcon already… I guess not, as it does not support MPE!

Avenger doesn't even support PolyAT. By the time V2 came out, I had a Seaboard Rise, a Hydrasynth, and now an S61 mk3. I'm not spending money on any "super synth" that doesn't do MPE, or at minimum PolyAT. But a unlike me, a lot of people don't use synths for performance. So this may no matter to them.

I've had Falcon for a while. There are technical ways to do MPE patches, but they are not worth the work, since you need to create layers that respond to each channel to pull it off. Not worth the effort.

Pigments on the other hand just works. The workflow is fantastic. Ignore all the "sounds like plastic crap" comments. That's just BS, and likely based on preset surfing. It has great oscs, fantastic filters and plenty of warmth. I'll go so far to say that if Pigments is "cold and digital sounding" then you would have to make this claim about every Arturia VA synth, because they share a common architecture, and even a lot of the same filters.

I agree. Since getting almost full time in Pigments I no longer dig into Omnisphere.

[Razzia]

I would vote for Pigments alone for its MPE friendliness. In Falcon it needs a script to implement MPE into a sound, which sometimes clashes with another script. Does Avenger support MPE? As far as I know it doesn’t. Its on sale now also, I am wondering if its worth it, having Halion, Pigments and Falcon already… I guess not, as it does not support MPE!

Avenger doesn't even support PolyAT. By the time V2 came out, I had a Seaboard Rise, a Hydrasynth, and now an S61 mk3. I'm not spending money on any "super synth" that doesn't do MPE, or at minimum PolyAT. But a unlike me, a lot of people don't use synths for performance. So this may no matter to them.

I've had Falcon for a while. There are technical ways to do MPE patches, but they are not worth the work, since you need to create layers that respond to each channel to pull it off. Not worth the effort.

Pigments on the other hand just works. The workflow is fantastic. Ignore all the "sounds like plastic crap" comments. That's just BS, and likely based on preset surfing. It has great oscs, fantastic filters and plenty of warmth. I'll go so far to say that if Pigments is "cold and digital sounding" then you would have to make this claim about every Arturia VA synth, because they share a common architecture, and even a lot of the same filters.

I agree. Since getting almost full time in Pigments I no longer dig into Omnisphere.

It's crazy how everyone seemed to just forget about Omnisphere in the last several years. I almost never use it either, and I couldn't even tell you why. I still think the presets are great. I guess maybe the actual synth UI is a bit dated/cumbersome for 2024, compared to things like Pigments, Current, Avenger, etc. And you get most or all of the same sound design power with those other synths (multisamples notwithstanding. I think only Avenger does that)

[martinjuenke]

It's crazy how everyone seemed to just forget about Omnisphere in the last several years.

They are not doing sales.
That's a problem during the Black Friday month.

[zerocrossing]

I would vote for Pigments alone for its MPE friendliness. In Falcon it needs a script to implement MPE into a sound, which sometimes clashes with another script. Does Avenger support MPE? As far as I know it doesn’t. Its on sale now also, I am wondering if its worth it, having Halion, Pigments and Falcon already… I guess not, as it does not support MPE!

Avenger doesn't even support PolyAT. By the time V2 came out, I had a Seaboard Rise, a Hydrasynth, and now an S61 mk3. I'm not spending money on any "super synth" that doesn't do MPE, or at minimum PolyAT. But an unlike me, a lot of people don't use synths for performance. So this may no matter to them.

I find it a bit frustrating that everyone hasn’t at least implemented polyphonic aftertouch. A bunch of synthesizers and popular MIDI controllers have it, so it’s not the rare, esoteric feature it was a decade ago. Hell, NI barely supports it and they make one of the best controllers.

[IvyBirds]

It's crazy how everyone seemed to just forget about Omnisphere in the last several years. I almost never use it either, and I couldn't even tell you why. I still think the presets are great. I guess maybe the actual synth UI is a bit dated/cumbersome for 2024, compared to things like Pigments, Current, Avenger, etc. And you get most or all of the same sound design power with those other synths (multisamples notwithstanding. I think only Avenger does that)

Omnisphere is an amazing instrument. I have owned it for many years and would but a Version 3.0 the second it was available

Omnisphere however is a different beast than Falcon or Avenger so it really doesn't get mentioned much in threads like this

Omnisphere really really excels at having a giant sample library full of things that "sound cool when run through a rompler engine"? Things that are unapologetically digital to create sounds that are unapologetically only able to be made with digital. That's something Eric Persing has been doing since the D50 days when he was at Roland.

I still have a blast making patches with Omnisphere and all it's unique samples, but I also really enjoy sampling Omnisphere and bringing those samples into things like Pigments, Falcon, HALion7 and even things like Myth

Omnisphere 2 however has been around for a long time (it has however seen many significant updates) and it's expensive and never goes on sale so I think it gets overshadowed by newer products

[Razzia]

It's crazy how everyone seemed to just forget about Omnisphere in the last several years. I almost never use it either, and I couldn't even tell you why. I still think the presets are great. I guess maybe the actual synth UI is a bit dated/cumbersome for 2024, compared to things like Pigments, Current, Avenger, etc. And you get most or all of the same sound design power with those other synths (multisamples notwithstanding. I think only Avenger does that)

Omnisphere is an amazing instrument. I have owned it for many years and would but a Version 3.0 the second it was available

Omnisphere however is a different beast than Falcon or Avenger so it really doesn't get mentioned much in threads like this

Omnisphere really really excels at having a giant sample library full of things that "sound cool when run through a rompler engine"? Things that are unapologetically digital to create sounds that are unapologetically only able to be made with digital. That's something Eric Persing has been doing since the D50 days when he was at Roland.

I still have a blast making patches with Omnisphere and all it's unique samples, but I also really enjoy sampling Omnisphere and bringing those samples into things like Pigments, Falcon, HALion7 and even things like Myth

Omnisphere 2 however has been around for a long time (it has however seen many significant updates) and it's expensive and never goes on sale so I think it gets overshadowed by newer products

You make good points. To be clear, my comment wasn't meant as condemnation of Omnisphere (not that I think you took it that way) just observing that in the last 5-8 years, workhorse synths have become incredibly frictionless to use. Were they to make an Omnisphere 3, I hope they'd put a lot of thought into adopting some of the immediacy of today's popular synths like Current, Avenger, Pigments, and so on.

I've heard people say that Omnisphere's preset library is dated or whatever. I still think it's one of the best. I am a fan of sound design intensive electronic genres but I still think the Spectrasonics and u-hes of the world make the most consistently strong preset libraries in that the presets don't bludgeon you with all the dubstepp-y sound designed stuff nor fit too neatly into a boring, genre specific niche.

[IvyBirds]

Were they to make an Omnisphere 3, I hope they'd put a lot of thought into adopting some of the immediacy of today's popular synths like Current, Avenger, Pigments, and so on.

I think rather than playing than just trying to duplicate what the others are doing, if they make an Omnisphere 3 they need to leverage the existing sample library that Spectrasonics has been building since the 1990s

You add to that and make it better and full of even more unique sounds

Then you leverage that sample library in new and exciting ways. You make it dead simple to load a sample and then extract single cycle waves out of it to make Wavetables. You develop a powerful resynthesis engine so you can resynthesize a sample and then transform that into something else

Finally you create a way to load a sample and display it as a spectragram. Then you can highlight sections of the sample whatever frequency bands you want and along any points in the timeline. Once selected you can then turn them into a wave table or resynthesis into something else

I think these things are inevitable for someone to do. We have seen bits and pieces of all of these things across many different programs, what we haven't seen is a single program that brings all of this into a single program that also comes with a giant sample library of all kinds of weird and wonderful things that utilize them

I currently do this using a combination of multiple programs. Starting with sampling something and then loading that sample into Izotope Iris to select something on the spectrogram, then sample that, then load into HALion7

[Razzia]

All good ideas. You could do a lot of that with Harmor, which I still think was one of the most capable sound design synths we've had, before Image Line discontinued it. I'm still pretty bummed about that. Two of their VST synths together cost as much as the whole FL signature bundle, and then were abruptly discontinued without the EOL update they promised when they announced cessation of support.

Anyway, I'm not saying Spectrasonics should model what others are doing in terms of the synth engine. I just think that synth GUI design has come a long way in the last several years and anyone who doesn't make an effort to match the immediacy that people are accustomed to should expect some criticism. Omnisphere is great but with everything being relegated to its own UI page, from envelopes, to waveshaper and ring mod parameters, to basic adjustments of modulator depth and parameters and so on, to each individual mod source being hidden behind a page that's accessed via dropdown menu... it's starting to show its age a bit. At least I think so.

[zahush76]

Just to close things off - i ultimately decided to buy Pigments 5. I reckoned for $49 the risk isn't that high, i like Arturia as a company and have their FX collection as well as V collection, like them and accustomed to their structure.

[c0LIn]

the VPS Scope is available at the Vengeance Sound Website again.
This time its free for everyone it seems.

[Gam456]

It's crazy how everyone seemed to just forget about Omnisphere in the last several years.

They are not doing sales.
That's a problem during the Black Friday month.

May be because they don't need

[Kypresso]

the VPS Scope is available at the Vengeance Sound Website again.
This time its free for everyone it seems.

Seems like its free only for owners of other vengeance plugins, "VPS Scope is free, but you need at least 1 other (DONGLE) based plugin from us (everything except Avenger counts)".