Hello everyone. I decided to give Pigments a chance and… I was surprised how the 7th version of this synthesizer can be so unstable. I use Ableton 12.1 and downloaded the demo version of the synthesizer. I produce pstrance music, and at the beginning I wanted to check how the bass would sound in Pigments. I heard from a friend that the sound seemed unstable. I heard the same thing myself. I saw that the presets were created by Dash Glitch, so I fired up one of them, “Bass Ventura”. I wondered what was wrong, so I threw an oscilloscope on the track. So at a tempo of 120, every sound seems to be the same, both by ear and the “shape” in the oscilloscope. When I started recording it, using the resampling or freeze and flatten option… everything started to diverge. Each 1/16 is shifted relative to the time axis, sometimes before, sometimes after. Such a slight offset. At the same time, the recordings from XFER Serum are exactly on point. It gets even more interesting when I change the tempo, to e.g. 145 BPM. I have the impression that the phase of each beat changes. It’s like throwing randomization to 2% in the said Serum. It is audible and visible in the oscilloscope. Is this behavior of Pigments normal? The synthesizer seems great, a perfect complement to my Serum, but something is wrong here and I don’t know whether to decide to buy it. Maybe one of you can check it out for yourself?
Sorry, i can’t reproduce this. Pigments works as expected in Logic Pro.
All is working as expected here too on Win11/Cubase Pro.
@Mateuszek I think it might be a good idea for you to log into your account and contact Arturia Support as this does sound like an odd one.
HTH!
Long time Pigments and Logic Pro user here. Although I have no explanation for the problems you are experiencing, I can say that I have never had a sync or timing problem. This very DAW specific to me. Best to raise it with Arturia.
You tell me that the problem doesn’t exist, but I’ve checked it on four different systems and four different DAWs. The result is the same every time. Beats in front of or behind the grid, zero regularity. I’m attaching screenshots. This is 1/4 beat and 3 1/16 notes playing on 2, 3 and 4. For example, of course. The first beat is in front of the grid, the next two behind. At first glance, everything may seem ok, just zoom in a little. 
I tried the same Pigments preset and I can confirm I also see those microshifts in the audio.
I repeated using a bass preset in Korg opsix native, and I see similar inconsistencies (I don’t have Serum to test that out).
Then I repeated using Cherry Audio Mercury, and each waveform starts dead on the beat every time!
So perhaps there is something there that plugins handle differently.
These slight shifts are why many music producers consider Pigments to be unstable. In most cases this is not a problem, but when you need to be precise it is quite a headache. Dune 3, Serum, Vital, Zebra or Phase Plant do not have this problem. At least as far as I could try them apart from Serum which I have. I would pass this information on to Arturia but I do not have the full version, I have only tried the demo. I think it will stay that way and either move towards Phase Plant or stick with Serum 2 only.
So I did a little further examination, comparing Pigments’ and Vital’s audio outputs with a basic saw wave.
It looks like Pigments (and other Arturia synths) always starts the wave at the closest 0-crossing point, even if it’s slightly behind or ahead of the actual note start. I assume this is to keep the waveform intact and not cause any pops.
Vital does something different. It will start the waveform at whatever point in its phase it happens to be, right at the exact note start. But to reduce pop, it quickly ramps from 0 to the actual phase position, slightly modifying the waveform in that tiny section.
Have you locked the phase in the case of Vital? If you lock the phase and throw in, for example, 4 1/16 notes, does each start at the same place? If you set the phase randomization to zero in Serum and set the starting point in the range of 1-180 degrees, will each 1/16 note start that way, and at the grid point at that.
Turning off Phase Randomization in Vital, it’s the same at each new note. It quickly drops from the final phase point of the previous note to the start of a new waveform for the new note.
So it’s not like Pigments tries to hit zero crossing points every time. If you change the phase position, it will no longer be zero crossing point. By default, it is set like this for the saw. When I record MIDI to audio at 120 BPM, the position of each sound is the same relative to the timeline. Slightly before its desired place, but then you can see the regularity. The problem occurs when you change the tempo. You can see it perfectly in the oscilloscope. The starting point, or phase, is the same, but it shifts relative to time. The next place where you can see stabilization is 150 BPM. There is something seriously screwed up in the code here.
Maybe you should also check what kind of buffer size is set when you’ve connected Pigments.
Here’s just an example that always works fine for me…
I use Arturia’s Minifuse interface and have tried every buffer size and sample rate setting. I’ve met another person who has the same problem, so it’s not an individual system or DAW issue. It’s amazing that it works like that in the digital domain. It seems more difficult to reproduce the imperfections of analog hardware than to create a wavetable synthesizer that behaves the same for every sound. It would be great to hear from someone at Arturia whether they are aware of this behavior of Pigments (they must be), whether it’s intentional, or maybe it’s a bug in a place where the program would have to be rewritten, which is out of the question.