Arturia Pigments 7 v7.0.1 [WiN]

• Product: Pigments 7
• Publisher: Arturia
• Version: 7.0.1.6772
• Format: Standalone, VST2, VST3, AAX
• Requirements: Windows 10 or later
• Source: arturia.com/products/software-instruments/pigments

Pigments has always been the synth you reach for when a single oscillator isn’t going to cut it. Version 7 doesn’t reinvent that formula — it sharpens it, adding three filters built on genuinely different DSP approaches, a new FM-based texture effect, smoother envelopes, and a redesigned Play view. If you build patches from scratch rather than tweaking presets, this update is squarely aimed at you.

Two Engine Slots, Six Kinds of Synthesis

At its core, Pigments gives you two engine slots, and each one can be loaded with any of six synthesis types: Modal physical modeling, Complex Wavetable, Sample and Granular, Harmonic Additive, and Virtual Analog. A separate Utility engine sits alongside those two slots, contributing a five-shape analog oscillator, two noise generators, and an external audio input you can route through the rest of the signal chain.

Because each engine slot carries its own oscillator model rather than sharing one algorithm across different wave sources, pairing Modal against Wavetable feels like a completely different instrument than pairing Granular against Virtual Analog. The two slots cross-modulate freely, which is where most of Pigments’ character comes from.

The catch: only two of the six synthesis types run at once. If you want to layer Modal, Wavetable, and Granular in the same patch, you’re out of luck — you’ll need to stack a second instance of the plugin in your DAW to get there.

Three New Filters: Rage, Ripple, and Reverb

The headline addition in version 7 is a trio of filters that don’t behave like a traditional cutoff sweep.

Rage runs a feedback loop with distortion built directly into the path, so instead of just steepening a slope, it pushes an aggressive, driven character into the resonance itself — think rumbling low end with real bite. Ripple stacks successive allpass filters at the same frequency, creating an intense phase shift that delays certain frequencies relative to others rather than removing them — closer to comb-style phase manipulation than subtractive filtering. Reverb is the odd one out: it runs a very short tail tuned to reshape timbre rather than add space, and pairs a post-filter distortion stage for thicker, stranger bass tones.

None of the three sweeps like a lowpass or highpass filter, so if you’re bringing over a patch built around a classic filter sweep, expect to rebuild the modulation from scratch around what each filter actually does.

Corroder: Texture, Not a Replacement Voice

Corroder applies FM to whatever signal runs through it — either an internal source or audio routed in from elsewhere in the patch — and the results range from subtle stereo widening to heavy digital erosion, depending on how far you push the FM amount. Unlike a vocoder or ring modulator, it doesn’t replace the source with something fully synthesized; the original signal’s identity stays audible even when you crank it.

Worth knowing before you dive in: the most extreme erosion settings depend on having an external signal already routed into that FM input — it’s not something you can dial up from Corroder’s own controls alone. And the effect behaves differently depending on what you feed it: sparse, low-harmonic sources pick up grit and grain, while already-dense sources can tip into full digital breakup at the same setting.

Smoother Envelopes — a Fix, Not a Feature

Attack and release now run through S-shaped curves instead of linear ramps. In practice, that means smoother fades at the shortest time settings while longer envelopes keep their natural, progressive shape. The clearest real-world case: a pure sine wave running through a multi-band compressor used to produce audible clicks at very short envelope settings — the S-curve fixes that specifically.

If your source material has more harmonic content, you probably won’t notice much difference, since the clicking issue was tied to low-harmonic signals hitting multi-band dynamics, not a general envelope problem. One thing to flag: older patches built around the exact timing of the old linear curve will play back slightly differently at short attack and release settings, because the underlying curve shape changed even though the numeric values didn’t.

The Redesigned Play View Costs Some GPU

The new Play page includes a reactive visualizer that renders the sound’s structure in real time as a patch plays — a nice touch, but one that adds graphics-processor load on top of whatever the audio engine already needs. To help keep things playable, version 7’s factory presets ship with multicore processing enabled and the granular engine’s grain limit capped at 64 by default.

If you’re on integrated graphics or an entry-level GPU, the visualizer can start competing for resources with a CPU-heavy patch — flip on “Disable Visualizer” if that becomes an issue. Just know that stacking several granular-heavy instances in a session adds up regardless of whether the visualizer is on, since each instance carries its own load. And if you’re reopening patches from earlier versions, they’ll keep whatever grain count and core settings they were originally saved with — the new defaults only apply going forward.

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