3 year Pigments user here - latest preset retail prices seem unrealistic

Software Instruments Pigments
#1

I’ve been using Pigments since about the time Pigments4 released, and I very much enjoy its sound, interface, and the raw sound design potential.

However the included presets, or any I make myself will probably be the only presets I ever own. $10 for 32 presets? $15 for 64? $30 for 150? From random content creators, sometimes filled with quite basic sounds? No thank you. Those prices are much too high, and I had to come say so.

If the prices were more reasonable per preset bank, I might purchase many of these from your ecosystem over time, but the value here is not high enough as it is today.

Also- the forum made me tag this post “pigments4” and there was nothing relevant to tag it with.

Thank you.

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#2

The Sound Banks they sell in the store go on a 50% Off sale every few months…It’s the only time to buy them.

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#3

50% off would be a starting point for this content, imo, and I didnt just start making music yesterday. I’ve been doing this (and buying music hardware and software) for 23 years now, and I’ve purchased ENTIRE expansion libraries from companies that offer me a good deal on products that I enjoy.

Getting Pigments5 today was very exciting, and I immediately went into the preset store to see what was on offer and I was honestly disappointed. I thought maybe by now there would be bundle offers or something, but no.

I just wanted to come to the forum and express this to the Arturia staff, if they watch this. I’m sure I’m not the only one who would spend more if these were priced better.

#4

The Explorations Bundle they announced today with Pigments 5 is 450 presets for $20 for existing Pigments owners (at least, that’s what they’re offering to me when I log in). I don’t seem them in the in-app Store for some reason, but if you go to the Pigments page and log in, you should see an offer there.

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#5

I would have to disagree.

The prices seem fair and even more so when there is a sale on. I have made hundreds of patches for Pigments over the years since it came out. I tried selling them but it wasn’t worth it, so now I give them away for the love of it (see my other posts). It takes a lot of time and effort to create the patches. I try to make sure a collection is varied, that individual patch levels match and categorise each with notes on Mod Wheel and Macro assignments. I have no idea in what quantity Arturia patch collections sell in, but I do know they pay the creator either a one off flat fee or a lower per patch fee based on sales.I suspect that translates into a perfectly reasonable hourly rate. Ask yourself how much your times worth.

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#6

Prices seem okay to me. I usually buy them on 50% off sales deals.

If you compare them to other preset makers,… 100 for $30 or $15 when the sales are on.

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#7

I am not here to argue, and was respectfully sharing a critical opinion with the vendor about preset pricing that can be widely observed. If you spend a few minutes sampling the demo presets from many of those store preset packs, you can easily determine that a number of them are low-effort, simple sounds that do not really take advantage of the power of Pigments, and I am not going to spend $10 per 32 of them. That’s just not reasonable, and again - Im here to share my experience. Not interested in debating with anyone about it.

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#8

I would only even consider buying any of these if they were 50% off.

Again my whole point here is a constructive criticism of preset prices, per package, per content creator. If Arturia do not wish to alter those prices, then I cant really say I will be patronizing many of those content creators. I also know that I am not alone in this opinion (KVR, etc) and was literally making an offer to the brand. If you make me more competitive package prices, I will patronize your brand.

Thanks.

#9

Well if you’re going to post your views on a community forum, don’t be surprised if people respond with their views.

I bought the latest 3 packs that have just been released, 19.99 for 450 presets. Super deal.

Trouble with too many people today is they think everything they use or buy should cost peanuts, they expect people to work for next to nothing, free games, free plugins, free whatever, they’re so used to those that they forget many people are making a living from their products, these people deserve a fair price for their work.

If you don’t want to buy, that’s your choice, personally I don’t think they are extreme at all, and that’s without the fact there’s numerous sales where they are often half price.

Again, if you didn’t want my opinion or are nor interested in what I have to say, then may I respectfully suggest that next time you email your thoughts to Arturia directly rather than putting them on a community forum.

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#10

If you are going to ignore the content of what people wrote and reply however you feel, dont be surprised when someone becomes annoyed with you.

The trouble with ignoring what people say and replying anyway is a “problem with people today”, and thus you may have missed where I said I’ve been buying music hardware and software for over 20 years AND that I typically buy out whole music packages when the offers are fair. The non-sale store offers for Pigments presets are NOT fair if you do a cost/quantity/quality analysis of many of those packages.

Yes - if I dont want to buy, its my choice. Thank you for granting me that! No, Im not interested in anything else you have to say, and yeah Im going to post my thoughts here, publicly, for staff and potential customers to see. Not going to privately email them, lol, about a public matter about pricing. ; )

#11

Sorry if I annoyed you, to be honest the only reason I replied was you saying you weren’t interested in what others thought, and that was a little annoying to me, presuming I understood what you were saying properly (wouldn’t be the first time I’ve miss-understood)

And also sorry for wrongly presuming you were one of those who expects everything for free, sadly there are a lot of them about.

Personally I too wouldn’t pay £9.99 for 32 presets, but I would pay half that which if what memory serves me correctly is what they reduce them to from time to time, presuming there was a sound in the demo that I really liked.

One of my annoyances is when a sound bank has hardly any demos, take the three I just bought, 150 presets on each, I hated all three of the audio demos on Beats Explorations, just 3 audio demos out of 150 sounds (well the last demo might have had a mixture of different presets in it, but to me it sounded like someone twiddling knobs to make sound effects that I’d never use, I’m sure many other people probably thought it was great). Had they not had the cheap bundle, based on the audio demos alone, there’s only one set I would have possibly have bought, and then only in a sale, as to me, I was effectively buying it almost blind, whereas now I’ve listened to a lot more, there’s presets I really like from all three.

Or to put it another way, I think they would probably sell more if they included many more audio demos.

Usually there’s only a few sounds on any expansion that I really like anyway, hence like you, I’m looking for my monies worth.

But it’s weird how things change, I’m 60 this year, bought my first hardware synth in about 1982. (2nd hand Korg micro preset)

When synths started having memory cards and you could buy presets. You couldn’t buy them for anything like £9.99 and that’s £9.99 last century.

Then again I lusted after certain synth in my youth, never could afford them (Jupiter 8 etc) and now for a fraction of the cost, I have them all on my PC :slight_smile:

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#12

I own 4 hardware synths, 5 including the Tempera that isn’t finished building yet, and I own 40+ software synths(and most of their available preset banks). I’ve also got a microKORG.

Im right around 50 years old and Ive watched… as this industry (and many others) become horribly exploited and ruined by investors and private equity groups. Just in the last 5 years alone, many once good, once valuable brands have been gobbled up and added to some investment brokerage portfolio, many good people have been laid off. The effect this has had across the music industry is objectively negative, with many companies trying to change what “a fair deal” means, how you create it, and who creates it.

Arturia is one of the few great INSTRUMENT makers that still exist, where they make actual synths and devices that can continue generating new content for many years to come, and they have not switched over to… selling “sound packs” or “instruments that are actually sound packs” yet, like others have. I hope that Arturia remains this way and continues to create real instruments, and does not succumb to the money-focused hypercapitalism spreading everywhere.

Thanks.

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#13

No argument intended. It’s a forum - I thought we might debate it. That aside, we agree on one thing: often patches and patch collections can be lacklustre and uninspiring. So, maybe as a later post says - there should be more audio demos showcasing the collection. That may help some creators up their game. Pigments is an amazing synth, deep, complex but very rewarding and I do feel that the more pedestrian patches do nothing to show off its capabilities.

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#14

Thank you for this suggestion. Even though I was logged in to my account and earlier to Arturia Software Center, I never saw that offer. I followed your advice and did find it, so I picked it up and found it reasonably priced and filled with good content.

When I get a new synth, I always like to pick up a little extra content for it beyond its factory content.

I really felt it was polite and reasonable to come ‘haggle’ these preset prices a bit. Ill check back when Arturia puts more of them on sale, and perhaps grab another bundle. In the mean time Ill make a few of my own! ; )

#15

There are indeed some very pedestrian preset packs, and even their 4-5 demo presets show this. Pigments is capable of so much, and a few of those $10 preset packs seem an insult to that, lol. As I’ve gotten older and have more experience buying this stuff, Im really looking for the value and quality, and I know Arturia has it.

#16

C’mon mate. We just got an upgrade for free. They have to make money somehow. Just wait for the sale and you’ll be fine. Those prices are purely a market thing for early adopters.

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#17

Not interested in debate. Ive been in this industry, and the tech industry, for 4 decades and I know what is fair and reasonable, and what is not. Observing the manner in which world capitalist economies move, and then defending them, is not in my blood, thanks.

#18

Some of the presets in the pack were worth the 20-buck deal for the whole set of expression presets in my book. I fully expected to pay for the upgrade.
I really love what Arturia does for its customers. On my hardware there are powerful, free firmware updates years after purchase,

#19

The current preset package (Expressions) offered by Arturia is a reasonable price, imo, but that isn’t why I posted.

I also expected to pay for Pigments5, but since it was offered for free, I understand Arturia will try to recover investment and earn profits through other means. (preset packs that, unless you buy them on sale, quickly cost more than Pigments4 itself).

#20

Apart from “price per patch” and the names of the sound designers, there are several factors which come into play when purchasing soundware. There are some “customer experience” (CX) details like frictionless purchases. And there are “playflow” aspects which we need not neglect. Arturia’s patch browser is somewhat better than average and it’s improving along with other features in their softsynths. Patches have more metadata, including useful comments about ways to use these patches. For Pigments specifically, it also means that we can play with a large range of sounds which respond to MPE and MTS-ESP, both of which bring value to the sound design work paid and curated by Arturia. Third-party patches often lack many of the affordances which enhance my experience with the plugin. (Some, by professional sound designers, don’t even respond to velocity!) Recent collections have added more in terms of expressiveness, which is precisely what some of us in the “Poly Expression” scene have been clamouring for. While I can tweak patches to make them useful with MPE controllers, a lot more inspiration comes from starting with diverse content than just trying to come up with ideas in my head. Regardless of designers’ names (several of which I do recognize from their work on different synths) or patches which demonstrate “busy work”, I want to listen to patches which tweak my expectations. So far, patches from first-party collections that I buy upon getting a free upgrade does match my need. Sure, some of them probably required less work than the kind of “song-in-a-patch” that I find difficult to adapt to context. As with other forms of design, sound design is often about subtle choices. (Misunderstandings about that is the reason some hair implements look so fake: people want to “get their money’s worth” and end up with something which isn’t subtle enough.)

Analog Lab V is another part of that story. The convenience of patchsurfing across diverse synths isn’t unique to that environment, of course. It’s just that it works quite well for my needs in its specific implementation. Of course, any User Experience (UX) affords improvement. At least, Arturia makes an effort. As my work is in UX research, I appreciate that effort quite a bit and I notice the results.

In the end, I don’t need that many patches. When I buy soundware, there’s a specific “jobs-to-be-done” analysis which comes through my mind. For the inexpensive bundles Arturia sells when they release a free upgrade to Pigments, part of it is a way for me to quickly explore the new affordances. I have yet to regret the cost of these purchases or the time I’ve spent patchsurfing through them. With some other synths (say, Physical Modelling, aka PhysMod), the job a patch does is much more into the minutiæ of sound design, because it can be hard to figure out complex interactions between parameters. (FM had that reputation when I got started on the DX-7, a few years after its release. That’s probably why some of the automatic patch-generation initiatives target that synthesis method.)

For Arturia’s hardware-only MicroFreak, there are so many free patch banks and the “sound librarian” experience is so tedious that the calculation is quite different. It took me a while to curate 257 patches from the available collections. Most of them open “new worlds of possibilities” despite the fact that, to me, the µF has a kind of “house flavour”. I probably wouldn’t purchase banks for that synth even if I could get many more patches from Big Name Sound Designer™ at a lower price than what I’ve paid for one of the Pigments collection. I’d rather work through an interactive tutorial created by such a sound design expert to understand her process while creating a new experience on the 'Freak (and I might use that in MiniFreak V as well as on the Micro, for stage use).

In other words, we all have our reasons to purchase certain things at certain prices. Because this is about music, which requires individual perception by human auditory systems, it’s a subjective matter, in a strong sense of the term.
Intersubjectively, we’re able to exchange ideas based on shared experiences with many of the same patches used in often radically different ways.
Sound demos would help many of us, as would further improvements in the browser and classification system.
(I really appreciate those synths which efficiently make recommendations for sounds which go together. It’s fairly noncontroversial to say that there are relatively simple AI techniques which work rather well for this kind of purpose yet we rarely benefit from that work. Perhaps because people now dismiss “presets” as much as they did fourty years ago.)

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