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! ; )
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.
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.
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.
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,
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).
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.)
As a Big Name Sound Designer™ I’d like to share my perspective from the other side:
First of all, making a good soundset can take months. At least, when real effort goes into the set itself. I know there are sound designers who make a few custom patches and then just scrub together everything they created in the past year for fun, to fill it up and sell 300 patches soundsets. It’s also popular to create several slight variations of a single patch to quickly get the numbers up. I’m not bashing on this since every set usually comes with a comprehensive demo, and people decide for themselves whether or not it’s worth to them.
But I, for instance, create every single patch from scratch. I don’t even use custom basic presets as a starting point, as it would hold the danger of depriving me of creativity and lead to potentially repetetive design.
I create my soundsets as diverse as possible in terms of how different the patches feel, while maintaining the overall theme of the set because you want a coherent sound and style.
So, naturally, the more patches are in a set, the harder it becomes to create new ones that add real value to the set and don’t sound too similar to the ones already existing.
Often the first 10 patches are done by week 2-3, the next 10 patches are done by week 5-6, and the last 10 are really tough and can take up more than at least another a month.
But this way 30 excellent patches in one set can offer more, than 100 mediocre patches in another set.
It’s not just sitting down on the synth, fiddling around 2 hours for fun, saving the patches and then selling them. If you want to do it properly, there’s a lot of stuff to take into consideration.
Many patches, Arturia curated ones included, are good “showcase” patches, but not really practicable when you want to compose actual music. Because they’re just too big, there is too much stuff going on. They either consume the entire mix, or, if you turn them down, lose to much of their depth and detail.
So when I create patches, I have to make them exciting enough while still being actually usable in a composition, which can be tough, depending on the patch type. As someone who mainly creates in the style of cyberpunk, I also often have to “invent” sounds.
If I were to make, let’s say phonk, I’d just copy what’s popular. But when I do cyberpunk, and that genre merely exists, it’s my job to shape it. To think how it would sound like, what the future would sound like.
Spending a few hours in the synth then becomes something like spending time in a lab and making experiments, trying out different combinations, colors, flavours, effects, and see if I can create new exciting instruments with more or less unheard sounds.
Many attempts are good, but not good enough for what I consider my quality standard for commercial releases, so often days go by without any actual final patch going into the set. That’s part of the process as well.
Then there’s a lot of stuff to think of, like what to put on the modwheel, how to fill the macros. With actual good modulations, things that the user would enjoy, things that would naturally extend how a patch is supposed to be played, or a transformation that makes sense and doesn’t throw off the entire instrument.
Of course it would be easy to just slap the same macros on every single patch, but that again would make it a bit boring. Some macros like cutoff are mandatory for many patches, but I often try to include at least 1-2 macros that open up more creative realms.
And then yes, there’s the price-per-patch ratio. A set with 30 patches for 10€ is 33 cent per patch. 33 cent for a patch that took often hours to make.
I like to compare this to getting a haircut: You gladly pay someone 30€ for a haircut that will most likely last just a few weeks, for one hour of work.
But the soundset you’ll keep forever, and it will not only contribute to your music, but even can make you money potentially, if you do any sort of professional work or offer your music on streaming services. So it’s an investment into your career.
But even if you’re just a hobbyist, people like to buy a coffee for almost the same price and starbucks without any complaint. A coffee that is gone 30 minutes after.
So I don’t really see the point of even bothering with patch pricings of 33 cent per instrument, that took hours to create. Most people are happy to pay that price and appreciate the great inspiring instruments they get in return.
I find these pricings are incredibly low, and they’re only possible because we (the sound designers) get our time investments back by selling larger numbers of our soundsets.
The individual customer really just has to pay a fraction of the original cost.
Of course I mainly do speak for myself here though, the quality of sets between different sound designers may vary. But all of this is certainly true for my work. And I believe many aren’t even really aware of how much work goes into a professional soundset.
Anyways, a last thing that I wanted to answer here:
This is for a good reason! Many midi-keyboards don’t really have a precise velocity-detection, especially the cheaper and mid-range ones that a large majority of people use, which would make velocity-sensitive patches go all over the place while playing.
So I naturally don’t bother with velocity, as it would annoy a lot of people who would need to turn it off one by one for every patch.
That being said, many patches wouldn’t really benefit from velocity. Velocity makes sense on a few expressive patches with specifically crafted depth-layers, or even more on percussion (to create rhythms), but many synth patches are just supposed to have a clear volume response and a solid “strength-level”, and velocity on artifical patches often rather hurt the overall sound than really adding value.
This is - in my opinion - one of these cases, where “less is more”, and patches benefit from not being overloaded with a thousand things going on that compromise their playability or quality.
Thanks a whole lot for chiming in, with your specific perspective. Useful insight.
Sounds like part of this thread’s thrust is about the lack of useful demos. Arturia could help, here.
Actually, something which does help a bit (in a few key situations) is that we do have access to some patches from packs we don’t own. In the very specific case where a whole pack is both cohesive and diverse, that could help players in choosing to purchase the whole thing.
That does sound like quite a challenge. Part of the way you describe it, it sounds similar to sound design for movie scoring, in which you want “family resemblances” between the sounds heard at different points in the movie. With game or XR scoring, it gets even more involved if you want the interaction design and the sound design to fit together. Surely, people can get how that’s a very complicated project, almost complex.
Of course, it’s not the use case for all soundbanks, which might be part of the differences in perspective.
Really interesting! Have you discussed this process in an interview somewhere? Sounds like the kind of thing Jamie Lidell would enjoy discussing.
Now we’re getting deeper into different use cases, which is quite relevant for this thread.
Agreed with you that there are plenty of patches which are pretty much unusable, even though they sound good in a demo. They’re still useful… for demo purposes.
As I’m doing fieldwork in this scene (as an anthropologist), I notice this trend as dominant. Many patches are created in such a way that you’re getting more of the person’s output than your own. Some are almost like “micropieces”, complete with elaborate seq/arp patterns or complex modulation. In the add for deadmau5’s Master Class, there’s a bit about pressing a key which launches the equivalent of a full clip. Never watched past that point so I may be wrong about the intention. To me, it was about being careful not to overload things in a patch. (Of course, there’s a whole world of powerful playflows coming from clip launching, which might be where the trend of creating clip-like patches originated. The difference is about the size of the material you use from other people. Using a patch which does this one thing is like using a sampled loop. Patches are typically smaller grains, that you can use in more contexts.)
We’ll come back to the use of “compose”, as it probably helps in distinguishing use cases.
Really nice way to put it! And while people think of labs for scientific research, this is where we understand innovation more generally, including culinary and artistic endeavours. In fact, there are already Living Labs and FabLabs which frame these things in such broad ways. In the end, innovation is about more than invention, so these experiments are about more than creating something new. There’s a whole context which will lead to use. This is where all the design disciplines relate to one another. (And it’s something which is hard to grasp for many design students during their first few years.)
Glad you addressed this, because it’s a point which actually doesn’t come up in most demos. A lot of patches out there just play this one sound. Often with a lot of movement… pre-determined by the designer. Macros and CC are of limited value with them. Having to find the sweet spots for several parameters is a lot of work, which decreases the value of the patchbank.
Again, the tooltips in Pigments help quite a bit, here. Playing within a much narrower range on a given knob isn’t just convenient. It helps adapt sounds to different contexts while maintaining some continuity. When different parameters interact in nonlinear ways (as is the case in PhysMod and, to a certain extent, in FM), having well-tuned macros is deeply valuable.
None of this is really needed in the kind of “showcase” sounds described above. Those are really like the demo sequences we had on our hardware synths in the 1980s and 1990s. People wouldn’t really tweak them to create something new. So, having fine-tuned CC and macros isn’t needed when you play something like a clip.
As you point out, part of the problem is that we think of patches as though they all had the same value, which is obviously not the case in practice. Scholars in different fields discuss this all the time. It’s even about “fungibility” (the ‘F’ in the (in)famous “NFT” acronym). We tend not to think about what that implies. When the price of any piece of music was set at $1 (iTunes and such), there wasn’t that much discussion about the difference between a 20-minute symphony movement and a 50s “musical gesture”. Nowadays, there’s a bit of discussion about what counts as a single “play” on a streaming service. We don’t think much about the actual value of the piece for the person who pays for it.
Because, as you point out, people use patches to create their own music, there’s another set of considerations. Going back to cooking (through the “flavour” analogy), it’s easy to realize that there are both commodities, measured in bulk, and products which vary a lot in value because they change the experience. In most situations, chefs will order flour or sugar based on a base price for a consistent level of quality. Yet they’ll be willing to pay a lot more for a key ingredient which radically changes the flavour of the meal, including spices and fresh produce. Bakers are much more specific about the flour they use… yet they might not care that much if it came from this lot or this other and, if they use wine for something, they probably don’t care much about the specific vintage of that wine.
When we buy patches, we fulfill different needs. We want to involve them in different aspects of our playflows. At the time of purchase, we may get influenced by the “money per patch” (or “money per gig”, in the case of samples/loops). I’m pretty sure that there are few people who truly benefit practically from having tens of thousands of patches.
It sounds like we’re building bigger haystacks in the hopes of finding more needles.
In fact, it could be fun to measure how many patches a professional musician uses in her entire career. I wouldn’t be surprised if the number were way lower than what the average synth consumer has.
Excellent point! It works like subsidizing work from which we can benefit as a group. Many things work like that, from insurance to roads and from movie-going to Patreon. Since we’re in a niche, the addressable market is small enough that things can’t really cost the same as commodities… even though they do when bought in bulk.
How much would it cost if I were to purchase a single custom-made patch for my exclusive use? Likely a lot more than the price of an Arturia-curated pack.
(It also gets us to the whole point about using presets and other patches created by others as opposed to creating our own. Much of the idea behind “these aren’t worth it to me” is similar to the “why go to a restaurant if I’m a good cook?” idea. If you’re your own sound designer and don’t find value in others’ patches, why have the discussion in the first place?)
So, altogether, we’re gaining valuable insight about what things mean in the market for synth patches.
Now, here’s a part where I have to respectfully disagree. Using velocity and other expressive features in the design of synth patches.
So… I get what you’re saying. Sorry, I simply can’t agree.
Here are some reasons.
One is that this issue could be addressed with global parameters. In most hosts, there are ways to bypass controls which don’t work the way you want. With the trickle of MIDI 2.0 devices coming out, it might be a good idea to make things forward-compatible as parts of the protocol allow for negotiation of what those are. “Oh, you’re a controller supporting breath control? Great! I’m a synth which can use that to good effect without distracting things for people who don’t use breath control!”
Related to this point, Arturia itself sells controllers which are premapped in their softsynths. Maybe you don’t like the sensitivity afforded those controllers in terms of velocity (or aftertouch, etc.). Yet, for people who want to leverage the Arturia ecosystem, there’s something quite disappointing when patches you get don’t support the controls which brought you to the ecosystem in the first place. So, it’s great that you do work on macros, as they’re mapped to knobs (or sliders) on Arturia controllers and are easy to map on other controllers. And I get that those don’t distract people who don’t use them. And those can work really well with automation. The logic for velocity isn’t that different, honestly. DAWs now make it really easy to work with velocity in meaningful ways, even if you use a controller which doesn’t handle velocity really well.
Another part of my disappointment with the lack of velocity support in some patches is that it’s harder to apply velocity in a way which works well to make a responsive patch than to disable velocity on that same patch (or, much easier, globally). Disabling the feature is “mindless”. Adding the feature requires the same kind of skill as described in creating the patch in the first place.
Then, we get into a core thing which distinguishes a whole class of synths (including Pigments) from the rest of the scene: Polyphonic Expression, mostly through MPE (for now). While it’s possible to have patches with lots of responsiveness in other dimensions which still ignore velocity, a big part of the performance with these expressive controllers has to do with the way these dimensions are integrated. Velocity (both on and off) can have a large impact on movement done along diverse axes with our controllers. And though one may say that it’s only a minority of users who have access to these, it’s a safe bet that the proportion is augmenting among users of Arturia products. In fact, part of what becomes “premium” in soundbanks has to do with the use of controllers which are different from the typical cheapo 25 minikey piano-style controller that people use to just get notes in a pianoroll. That includes Arturia’s MicroFreak. And Ableton’s Push 3.
It’s fairly easy to understand the frustration felt by a musician using a responsive controller who stumbles upon a patch which doesn’t respond to velocity. Feels broken.
Which is part of the “dominant approach”… and it’s such a different intention from what many of us need!
Now… Since you used the term “compose” a few times and since you specifically work in the emergent genre of cyberpunk, I do get that it may be less of a concern for your specific market.
And that leads to something about market segmentation, which is done organically… and left implicit.
Arturia could help, here. There really isn’t enough metadata allowing me to tell which patches are “supposed to have […] a solid ‘strength-level’”. Nor is it easy to find out which patches will give me the type of expressiveness I need in performance, using a variety of controllers. Again, we’re all playing in a niche. Might as well have things designed for niche uses.
The reason I brought up breath control earlier is that windcontrollers remain a big part of what I use (though I’ve been moving more and more towards MPE in the past nine years, which is the reason I bought Pigments when it came out, more than 5 years ago). There are a few synths which work well with windcontrollers, typically because they were designed specifically for us. Some, like SWAM Instruments, which explicitly support our controllers, remain compromised in several ways as they’re mostly meant for keyboard-based (wannabe) scorers. And then, there are synths with broader appeal (within the niche of synthing) which allow for the kind of responsiveness we need because they were designed so well. It’s the case with every u-he synth I’ve tried. There are several patches for these which require little to no tweaking to sound good with a windcontroller. People who’ve never even heard of a windcontroller aren’t distracted by that.
Right. The same is true for PhysMod patches (say, on Pianoteq or on MicroFreak), patches meant for guitar players, patches for drones and pads controlled by MPE, etc.
Those patches are much more valuable than what’s sold “by the pound” throughout our niche.
This is interesting. Usually I might find just one sound out of 30 that I really like, but those presets are usually a mish mash of different sounds no matter what the expansion is called.,
Wife’s a hairdresser, haven’t paid for a haircut for around 40 odd years lol, but yes people are happy to buy designer clothes, hair, coffee, ice cream, PC/console game, alcohol etc yet expect patches to be created for nothing.
The problem is:
So many patches out there whether they cost £10 or £50 are mediocre at best. So many of us have experience of buying such patches that unless it’s a sound we really really want, are naturally reluctant to pay more.
as I said in my pervious post, often you get two or three demos at most, and that always has me thinking “are they demoing what they think are the best patches, if so how bad are the rest”, and quite often I’m not keen on any of the demos, but when I treat myself in a sale, I find there’s other presets absolutely nothing like the demos that I really like.
When you have the internet full of patches that have probably often taken no more than an hour to cobble together, and when you often find free presets sounding better than some paid ones, people like yourself are always sadly going to be under appreciated.
I would happily pay more for patches like you make, presuming I can demo them all first, the trouble is if I can’t demo all the sounds. I can’t really tell whether a lot of thought has gone into them or not.
What’s better from an earning money point of view
Selling 500 at £50 giving you £25,000
Or selling 5000 at £10 giving you £50,000 and giving more people exposure to your product, although I do appreciate you might have a ton more buyers asking you questions/support.
I suppose where it falls down is if 500 people would have been willing to pay £50 but you had to sell for £10, and only 1000 others chose to buy it for £10.
I also think that if it’s dirt cheap, people don’t always think of it as a professional product
While I expected lengthy explanations that attempt to describe the economics of content creation in a way that justifies the costs that motivated my original post, I’m really not here to debate and will become less patient as the thread goes on. I dont really want this thread to end with claims that these economics are rational - they arent. And this isnt just about Arturia, it is industry wide.
I know perfectly well what it takes to create content - and GOOD content - as I am a creator and sound designer myself. I’ve been doing these things and thinking about these things for over 20 years, or 30 if you consider my late teens experiments, and I’ve watched it all go down to where we are today. I’ve also spent a decade SUPPORTING sound designers and live produced shows, so I hear that side of it as well.
I know what it takes to generate income with content, and when you appeal only to the smaller slice of the market (the folks with money to burn and less concerns about value), you alienate the MAJORITY of your customers. The majority of people are not wealthy if you view the western economies, despite how some of them fake it.
No, buying synth presets and instruments for artistic expression, a widely understood human need that has been present since our primordial days, isnt the same as the “designer clothes” or “getting your hair done” - this isnt the bourgeois space, nor is anybody asking for free presets or for artists not to be compensated for their work. In an economy as late and broken as the western economies, where wage/compensation has been effectively frozen for 30 years, the economics of musical instruments arent what you think they are.
The Microfreak is an example of a very high value for the money, in terms of the amazing capabilities of this hardware synth, the special keyboard surface, the stock presets, and all the new content added for free during the 5.0 firmware update. This, imo, is a proof that it is possible to create something for the masses - something physical even - where profit and good product lifespan are still accounted for. I just purchased the vocoder mic for my microfreak because it is so affordable and it added LARGE amounts of value to the device.
$10 for 32 presets for a software synth - including many packs that are mediocre at best - is a bad deal, and I am far from alone in this opinion. This is my opinion, and I came here to share it with Arturia, not get into a debate with random people.
Well, you posted in a public forum which was created for discussing topics, so other people are also allowed to share their own opinions.
You don’t have to be wealthy in order to spend 10 bucks, even the poorest of the poor are buying cigarettes and beer on the regular. And having hours of fun with synthesizer patches is certainly a thousand times healthier, even as some sort of stress-relief.
It’s not really free, the people who developed these updates got paid for their work, and that money also comes from the soundsets that Arturia does sell. Keyword subsidisation.
So these soundsets, which you want to be even cheaper than a coffee that’s made within 2 minutes - and the people buying them - play a vital role for the ability to offer “free” updates on other products.
There’s almost nobody that thinks so. Amongst hundreds of soundsets that I sold, the feedback was rather happy about the pricing.
Returning to the coffee example, even students spend many of their days in the coffeeshop. They easily leave 10-15€ per day, despite having way less money at their disposal than the average employee, since students usually only work part-time or have minijobs.
This is simply not a sum that people have a crisis over, questioning whether it was worth it or not. And they certainly don’t share the same level of passion for coffee, as synthesizer enthusiasts do for patches.
Live and let live.
Yes, you’re right that it depends on the genre, and there are purposes where velocity-sensitive patches have their place. But these are very specific patches.
From my personal sound design perspective, velocity isn’t a feature that should just be thrown on every patch as a must-have feature.
Velocity as instrumental behaviour is derived from real life instruments: Piano, strings, guitars and so on. That means that there’s a strong association between velocity and feelings that one could describe as natural, human or organic. Velocity also makes it possible for soloists to express more emotion into their one and only instrument, especially when they perform long pieces with different acts.
So it serves a very specific purpose, and it also evokes a specific set of feelings. In electronic music people often don’t do/want that. There’s a lot of stuff going on in a composition, and it’s rather loud and powerful than sensitive, soft and emotional. Having sudden velocity-changes on a sharp edgy basseline or a big dystopian pad would alter the entire feeling.
And if there’s the need to incorporate an instrument that evokes one of the feelings I described above, people usually have way better options at their disposal, by manufacturers who sampled real life instruments and created hybrid VSTs from that.
Approaching ‘expression’ through the mod wheel and more from the sound design side fits the expectations and vibe of electronic music way better imo. Together with some macros, there are a lot of opportunities to create an interesting performance.
I assume by demo you mean an audio preview. I don’t know how most other sound designers handle their demos, but I always release a complete overview video together with any new set, and every patch plays its own part - with 2-3 exceptions per set, where two or three patches may play together, to showcase a small musical idea. But I introduce them one after another and don’t make these too complex, so that it’s still easy to hear them one by one, since I know that this is what people are most interested in.
Well, of course from a revenue point of view, the higher amount would be better.
But there’s more to consider between these two examples:
Apart from what you already mentioned, that 10€ grants a better accessibility for people on a budget (which I like), the amount of patches has quite some impact on the creation process.
When I create a set with 30 patches, I can take my time to experiment and refine details, and I can throw away medicore patches without guilt. The creativity is high and the mind feels fresh.
Creating 150 patches however can become very tedious task, and it might lead to the desire to rush things and keep mediocre patches or create patches with just minor alterations, because there’s still so much to fill. And after a certain amount of patches, the set would start to stray more and more away from its theme in order to deliver new patches that offer variety, which would most likely end with the problem you’ve described above: The set doesn’t work too nicely together, regardless of the theme.
I’m a huge fan of theme-based products. I like to think in and work with strong concepts, in order to create a high quality product that feels very consistent. And I found that sets of around 30 patches works best for me for that purpose.
Offering smaller sets also allows for more customization. People can bundle together sets they prefer, creating something more personal, opposed to purchasing a 150 patches set right away.
Yes, I posted publicly in the only place Arturia has provided to do so, and I DIRECTLY addressed Arturia and indicated I didnt want this to become an argument with brand-defenders or economics defenders. I expected people to READ what I wrote, but I see that was too lofty a goal.
And yet here you are, along with 27 paragraphs that I did not read. I’ll block you if you spam me again, thanks.
A direct conversation with Arturia would be via email, this is a forum for the community to discuss topics and it’s being used as such. Multiple users have told you that by now.
You simply can’t tell other users not to use the forum, only because you disagree with their opinions and would like not to see anyone bringing in another perspective.
That’s something one has to tolerate when engaging in forums.
Yes, a quick audio demo of most if not all of the patches. Too often there’s two or three individual audio demos, then a demo using some of the other patches but also often using other stuff as well (and I presume various effects etc).
For me, I just want to hear a quick demo of individual patches, how they sound when I select them. I appreciate a quick audio demo isn’t feasible for say a patch that varies over time, and just hearing a few secs worth wouldn’t show off that patches potential, but as a general rule I simply want to know what I’m buying before I buy it.
That said, for them to demo all 450 sounds on the recent exploration packs probably wouldn’t be very practical.
Often, when there’s a demo utilising a fair few patches, it’s used in a genre that doesn’t appeal to me, hence it clouds my judgement on whether those patches would be useful to me or not.
Still, over the years I’ve bought a ton of expansions, more often than not, I find at least one patch I find useful and often many more. I don’t think I’ve bought an expansion where I’ve disliked every patch. When I say bought, I’m not for example talking about say the 103 expansions that came with my recent Komplete CE edition purchase (not even tried most of them yet) , I’m talking about when I’ve decided to pay for a particular expansion.
So I’ve no real reason to complain, it’s just how I feel, and sometimes I wonder if I might actually buy more expansions if I could hear more of the patches first, if I don’t like the handful of audio demos, I give the expansion a miss, but maybe there’s 5 other patches in the expansion that if they were also demoed, I think are the greatest patches ever and have to buy it.
Its funny but unsurprising how many times Ive explained the reason for my post, and how I am uninterested in arguments or brand management attempts, but here we are anyway. Accounts will continue to try to hijack the thread and turn it into brand promotion or feel-good content, as expected.
So as long as you persist in trying to hijack my thread, I will continue to reply in a manner that puts the thread back on track. Have it your way! When you stop trying to hijack my thread, Ill stop reiterating my point.
My primary reason for posting was to communicate directly to Arturia - not to randos who perhaps feel like they are speaking for Arturia - about the widely understood poor value of many of the preset packages found on the internal Pigments storefront/UI. And this isnt just a problem of Arturia or its principal investors - this is becoming more widespread by the day.
When I say “widely understood poor value”, it’s probably less obvious what I mean with so many people trying to steamroll the thread (and my analysis) and water down what I was originally saying. What I mean is, if you spend time on large, popular music communities (KVR, gearspace, etc), and/or you’ve been involved with this industry for a few decades, you can see that more and more customers, especially those with experience and lots of time & money invested in it, are becoming disgruntled with the direction things are moving today – they move toward rent-seeking behaviors and away from ownership and long-term value propositions.
Being a French company, Arturia is already much better positioned than many other music/instrument companies, and comes from a culture that is more critically aware of the economic/labor issues Im talking about than any american, british, or english-speaking countries. When labor compensation is stagnant across the west for 40ish years, but all the costs of living are rising forever, this means that when you adopt a rent-seeking, lower value business model you are ignoring this reality and appealing mostly to a wealthier audience. You appeal to people with money to burn and less concern for value, and you alienate the bulk of the working class, who will see the obvious poor value and move on.
I would have had no trouble paying $100-200 for Pigments 5 with stock presets because this is a valuable proposition. There is LOTS of ongoing value in sound design options in Pigments, and the stock presets are valuable + templates for new presets. I could make 10,000 presets with Pigments for $0, and enjoy this without a single update for many years.
However that wasnt the offer. Instead Pigments5 suddenly showed up for $0 in my account because Arturia and their content creators expect to recoup that loss (giving away software is considered a loss) through ongoing preset/other sales. At the prices offered, I would easily spend $500++ on presets, when even the original Pigments was $199.
If you cannot see that this more sophisticated offering is, in fact, a higher profit generating model, you may need to look closer at the economics of this offer.
This thread was originally only about my concerns being communicated to Arturia. Now it is much larger thanks to the other participants.
And now, I see my totally non-offending comments being flagged by people as inappropriate? hah! And the comment flagged was where I had to block another user for being rude and ignoring my original post?? This is all so typical of online retail brands of all flavors, all industries, all western nations, its dystopic and hilarious all at the same time. I came for an honest bit of haggling, and I leave with the knowledge that the same dishonest brand management garbage goes on here as NI, Steinberg, and the rest of these brands.
No worries – whomever falsely flagged my comments, no worries at all. I have experienced what I needed to experience here today, with Arturia’s moderation and with the community. No need to waste anybody’s time further. I dont think I need to worry about Pigments preset packs much, after all. Thanks for the free synth! Good luck selling preset packs.
