Mason is pretty awesome as far as soft-synths go. UPDATE: holy shite! it does have a huge number of presets. Or maybe the full version Pigments has so many presets that I'll be fine with those, even if I never get around to creating my own custom synths?

Any opinion on whether a package with Less Assembly Required might be a better place for me to start?

Of course software downloads are non-refundable so I'm doing lots of investigation before purchasing. In the meantime, do you know of any other worthwhile soft synths with tons o' presets? Mason, my guy at Sweetwater, mentioned Komplete but I really don't know this field at all (just know what sounds good to me while composing). Since I have zero knowledge of soft synths, for the moment I'm depending on presets exclusively and trying to work through as many as I can before I hit the demo's 20 min. I'm trying the free demo of Pigments now and it's a bit overwhelming. Some folks have complained about the lack of a waveform editor, but I wouldn't know where to start with that anyway. O'darque hunnett: Many thanks, that's great info. One other thing: I've found that my MiniLab is a great interface to use with Pigments and AL4, despite my personal bias against ribbon-based pitch bend and mod controls. Updates to the synth will address the CPU load in time that's how Arturia did with Analog Lab (and, I'm surmising, their V Collection) over the years as well. So if you can score it for $50 less, by all means, do it. I'm lucky to have bought it when they were pushing it at what's now half-price (only $99 for me at the time), and I noticed it was at $199 when September started. But it really is a veritable playground of sound. (I too am learning as I go along, so whatever else I find, I'll share.) My level of experience is that I don't get too far off into wavetable editing, and that's one of the other cons about this soft-synth. It IS a CPU hog, to be sure, but the rough trade-off there is you can always bounce your MIDI recording to audio if you're happy with the overall effect of the performance you 'committed to tape'. I was using NI's Komplete 10 (with some ala carte add-ons since its release), but what I like with Pigments is that it's geared for those who like designing their own sounds using stock patches as a springboard.

You're gonna like this Pigments soft-synth.

Arturia pigments review