Pigments 2 has three main screens, the synth page, the effects page, and the sequencer page. That’s the starting point for your patch from there, you have three envelopes, thee LFO’s, and three function generators to at your disposal. Pigments utilizes a twin audio engine, which lets you combine virtual analog and wavetable oscillators with a sample engine. Too many soft synths have such convoluted UI’s that put you off even starting, that’s not the case here. The first thing that we loved about Pigments is the colorful, easy-to-use interface. On top of everything else, there are 58 FX units, up to 34 filter algorithms in series or parallel, and much more.Īrturia is renowned for incredible attention to detail, so when they say Pigments was 20 years in the making, you can expect it to be one of the best synth plugins money can buy. You can import audio files as a sound source for many Omnisphere tools, but it’s especially interesting with the granular synthesis. Omnisphere is a very powerful granular synth as well, which is fantastic for adding texture variation to your patches. Other updates include the unique arpeggiator with chord voicing, new step modifiers, and dividers it’s huge. What that means is that if you own any of the supported 65+ classic hardware synths, you can use it as a controller for Omnisphere, so you have a hands-on workflow.

Omnisphere is the only soft synth with hardware synth integration. Sounds can be layered, too, up to four layers per patch. There are also eight LFO’s per patch and 12 envelopes with ADSR or multi-breakpoint interfaces. Oscillators can be DSP or sample-based, and there are over 500 DSP waveforms for the synth oscillator. The real beauty is in how deep into the sound design you can go, with up to 20 oscillators per patch. It now comes with over 14,000 sounds that cover just about every genre of music you can imagine. At the time of writing, Omnisphere is on version 2.6, which comes with some extensive updates. Omnisphere 2 had to be number two because it’s the king of soft synths, as has been for some time.

Nexus vs omnisphere