The conflict of interest, stated once
I wrote Laura. I would like you to buy it. You should read the rest of this with that in mind, and you should check anything here that matters to you, because every claim about the other three is checkable in about ten minutes with a demo.
What I can offer instead of neutrality is specificity. A comparison that says my synth is warm and inspiring is worth nothing. A comparison that tells you Vital is free and that free is often the correct answer is at least falsifiable.
Vital: free, and frequently the right choice
Vital is a very good wavetable synth that costs nothing. Its modulation is legible, its wavetable editor is strong, and its spectral warping is excellent. If what you need is a modern wavetable synth and you have not got one, install Vital first. I am not being generous, I am saving you sixty nine dollars you might not need to spend.
The case for anything paid over Vital has to rest on something Vital does not do rather than on doing the same thing slightly better. That is a high bar and it is the correct bar.
Serum 2: the one with the ecosystem
Serum is the industry default, and the reason is not only the synth. It is that every preset pack, every tutorial, every YouTube walkthrough and every collaborator you send a project to already speaks Serum. That network is real value and no small developer can manufacture it.
If you buy and open other people's preset packs, or you follow tutorials that assume a specific synth on screen, buy Serum. Nothing I ship changes that calculation, and a comparison that pretends otherwise is trying to sell you something.
Serum 2 also added a lot: granular, multisampling, a deeper effects section. It is not a synth standing still while smaller instruments catch up.
Pigments: the broadest of the four
Pigments covers more synthesis types under one roof than any of the others, and Arturia's sound design team is deeper than one person can be. Its factory library is the strongest of the four by a distance, and if you patch mostly by browsing and tweaking rather than from scratch, that matters more than any feature list.
Where it costs you is the subscription pressure and the account. Pigments perpetual exists, but the company would rather you were on a plan, and everything Arturia is wired through their software centre.
What Laura has that the others do not
Three things, and I will keep the list short because a long list is a sign nothing on it is load bearing.
The oscillators can read their waveform out of a fractal. Not a wavetable exported from a fractal image, a live reading of the escape behaviour of a Mandelbrot, Julia, Burning Ship, Tricorn, Multibrot or Newton set along a path you move. The coordinate is a modulation destination, so a chaos attractor can wander it while the note is held and the note never repeats. No other synth on this list does this, and as far as I can find, no synth on any list does. There is a longer explanation of how it works if that is the part you came for.
The voices in a chord can affect each other. There is a reaction diffusion field running behind the synth that every voice feeds and reads, so a tight voicing grows into itself and a wide one stays clean. In every other synth here, four notes are four independent copies of the same machine.
The tuning goes all the way down. Laura is an MTS-ESP client, and the conversion from note to pitch was replaced everywhere rather than in the obvious place, including glide targets, unison, the sequencer and retuning under a note that is already sounding. Coarse transpose moves by a scale step, so it still means something in 22edo. That work has its own page.
What Laura loses on, plainly
Ecosystem. There is no Laura preset industry, there are no Laura tutorials on YouTube by people who are not me, and nobody you collaborate with has it. That is the single biggest practical difference between Laura and Serum and it will stay true for a long time.
Eyes. Serum has had a decade of users finding its edge cases. Laura has few enough that I know several of them by name, and every bug it still has is one that they and I have not hit yet. The fixes land fast, often within days, which is the one real advantage of a one person shop, but fast fixes are not the same thing as a mature surface.
Factory library depth. Three hundred and two presets is a real library and it is not two thousand curated by a team.
If any of those three are the deciding factor for you, the honest answer is to buy something else, and I would rather say that here than have you find out after a refund request.
The cases where Laura is actually the answer
You want a sound that does not exist yet, and you are willing to spend an evening finding it rather than browsing to it. The fractal engine rewards exploration and gives very little to someone in a hurry.
You write in something other than twelve equal, and you are tired of instruments that are microtonal in the marketing and twelve tone in the glide.
You want a pad that never settles. Between the chaos attractor, the reaction diffusion field and LFOs that modulate other LFOs, holding a chord for two minutes is a thing to do rather than a thing to avoid.
You want to pay once, own it, and not have an account. Sixty nine dollars, lifetime, offline activation, no telemetry, and a demo that gives you the whole instrument for thirty minutes a session so you can find out before you spend anything.
The test I would apply
Download the demo and give yourself thirty minutes on the fractal oscillator with the boundary lock on. If nothing happens that you could not have got from the synth you already own, you have your answer and it cost you nothing. If something does happen, it is the kind of thing that is hard to get any other way, which is the only real reason to add another synth to a folder that already has too many.
The demo is here. No account, signed installers on both platforms.
Keep reading
- Why your tempo synced LFO is in the wrong place · Set an LFO to one bar, print the loop, and it sounds right. Stop the transport, hit play again, and the same bar sounds different. The rate was never wrong. The position was.
- How to program a tape stop instead of drawing one · Every glitch fill you have printed was drawn by hand, once, for one drop, at one tempo. The alternative is to write time as a pattern and let the fill happen on the bar, every bar, without you being there.
- How to build a riser that never ends · Every riser you have printed ends somewhere. It runs out of top, or it loops and you hear the seam. A longer sweep will not fix it. What does is an illusion that has been sitting in the psychoacoustics literature since 1964.
Hear it for yourself. The demo is free and unrestricted for 30 minutes per session.