I know this has been requested by many users but can someone please confirm if this is in development at this moment?
Thanks!
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Hi,
Thanks for the feature request!
Just out of interest, would you find this most useful because you’re creating your own sounds/presets and want to assign more macros, or do you solely use pre-made presets and feel there aren’t enough controls?
I cant say I am a supporter of this idea - and I say that as a sound designer. I think 4 macros are sufficient and an additional 4 would seem overkill as well as eating up pretty valuable GUI real estate.
But maybe that’s just me.
Hi Andre,
There are no plans for this currently.
One big reason that comes to mind is when we design our presets, the macros and what they do are of high importance to the preset.
We validate every preset including making sure all macros and mod wheel are assigned to something meaningful that stick within our guidelines and quality expectations. And it goes through a few of us on the sound design team as well as QA.
To add another 4 macros to each preset would be a lot of work and in most cases, overkill.
I guess it’s not out of the question to have an extra 4 hidden somewhere and for them to be ignored in our design process. This way the user can have the option to use more, but this is currently not the focus of Pigments.
As always, new features are being considered and worked on. So, Pigments will continue to grow and evolve.
Maybe one day!
Thanks for the reply Joe, 
I understand your concern about redesigning the presets but that wouldn’t be necessary. You could still leave it as it is but give the users the ability to chose to display more macros simply for the purpose of sound design specially when designing presets to be used in a live performance situation.
I’m a sound designer with 20 years of experience working in the area who along the way have been designing most of the sounds (not just in my music) from scratch, having only 4 macros is very limiting specially with a pluggin like this that has so many engines and parameters. This is a rabbit hole that I’ve travelled many times along the years. Following the principles of having different engines like with Diva or Zebra comes with a cost which means that it’s not efficient to expose every single parameter in a DAW, so thinking strategically in advance is crucial when deciding which parameters you want to have exposed.
Also from a software functional analyst perspective (which is also my job), my role is always to deliver the user the best experience possible, so having that insight as well gives me confidence to say this as a user of Pigments too.
In this case having 8 macros (at least) is the bare minimum to cover a lot of sound aspects, and different combinations of Engines/FX especially when working with Bank/Sub-Bank/Program Changes (which in the case of Arturia is excellently well implemented 
) to change presets in a live/production situation.
Hive2 has 16 macros, Serum2 8, even the old Massive has 8 too, not to mention DAWs like Ableton that increased from 8 to 16, and the reason is always the same, flexibility.
At this moment I practically use Pigments as my only VSTSynth because the UX/UI is incredible, and has practically everything I need on a daily basis to achieve the ideas I have. Sure, Serum 2 and Phase Plant even Zebra, take this even further but Pigments doesn’t need to be that, it can be exactly what it is and not missing any essential aspects like this one.
I hope this answers your question why having 8 Macros at least is an essential add-on for sound designers who use pigments with Program Changes in a Live situation. It can be a cpu demanding in some presets so having less instances of the plugin and changing sounds from there is always a good strategy.
Best regards!
André G. Mendes @ iMAGene
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May I suggest you get a copy of Unify from Pluginguru. It will allow you to have up to 16 macros if you like. Just run your instances of Pigments inside of it. It is not expensive and is a tremendously useful plugin for a lot of other reasons also. I use it all the time.
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All good points, I’ve been doing it 20 years at this point too and I find 4 restrictive in some cases. Particularly in Current as it’s such a workhorse but only has 4 macros.
From the point of view of Arturia and the current direction for Pigments, 8 is not in the current planning but never say never.
To clarify, we wouldn’t need to redesign old presets, I just meant going forward having to design for and then validate 8 macros would be a lot of extra work for us. But as I also said, we could still supply extra macros and not include them in our designs.
Anyway, for the request. I have passed it on to the Pigments team.
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Count me in as requesting more macros. I am a virtual synth programmer since 2002, and a modular synth designer, builder, player since 1985. Almost every patch i create with Pigments wants for more macros. It’s particularly an issue for live performance. Eight is kind of the “norm.” I described in a previous post some implementations that wouldn’t interfere with the current setup. A hidden tab would also work. Please relay my second request. While you are at it can we have the labels capitalized, it actually makes a difference in the microsecond decisions of live improvisation. Thanks
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Hi all,
Hi all,
More Macros would be nice. But i think it’s important to not confuse Macros that only control one parameter and advanced Macros that control multiple parameters.
Pigments individual parameters can be controlled using the midi config.
The parameters are available in hosts.
This topic has also been discussed here, where i among others give my opinion:
May i ask what Program Change has to do with Macros?
Pigments playlist feature can be useful for Live performance.
I’ll give you an example.
Preset 1 - Let’s say in Preset 1 I’m using wavetable for osc1 and 3 effects (reverb, delay, comb filter) on insert.
Preset B - And on Preset B I’m using Analogue on Osc1 and 3 other FX on insert A (chorus, Shimmer, Distortion)
In an ideal scenario of 16 Macros I could reserve the last 3 Macros for dry/wet of the effects regardless of what effects are because since they are mapped, each time I change a preset via program change I know that these last 3 macros are always related to the dry/wet of which FX the preset has.
Applying the same logic I could do the same for the oscs as well meaning that although I still have access to each parameter, from a programming standpoint I can setup the interface (The macros in this case) independent of how it is implemented.
In Live my vsts are always exposed to the max 128 parameters but in the case of Pigments there are way more parameters so to overcome this limitation the macros are the only way to get the most flexibility because their function is related to the specific preset.
Hope this responded to your question
Thanks for the reply @AndreGM.
I agree a very good advantage of having Macros is they can be set to control different parameters in each preset but still use the same midi CC, if that’s hat you mean. That’s the reason why i also would like more macros.
Not all of the Macros need to be advanced to control multiple parameters, if there are many of them. But it would be nice anyway to have the option.
I think 16 macros is less likely to happen, but 8 seems reasonable at this stage.
One subject that’s come up recently is a macro dedicated to wet/dry would be nice to have across all Arturia software. That is just a thought at the moment though.
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