DAN AGOSTO: Hello, and welcome to the Gearwire Synth Lab. My name is Dan Agosto and we’re taking a look at the Moog Music Little Phatty, and this thing while small in size has some big sounds, so let’s take a listen. This is et to a preset. This is preset zero. It’s called “Thank You, Bob”.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

So, pretty classic Moog sound. We’ll go over the topography of how everything is edited but let’s take a listen to a few more of these presets. Let’s try the next one. This one is called “Nasty Fun K”.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

Okay. So, let’s get into a little bit of how you program this. First thing you hear that there’s a really like sort of slow, sluggish glide on the note.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

If you want to do like fast octave switch there, we’re going to have to turn that up. The way we do that is we locate the glide rate. Well, first of all we can turn glide on and off using this button.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

So, now everything is jumping. I’m about to change the glide rate. We see that this button is lit up, and this is the glide rate button, and that means that this encoder up here, this knob, is set to control the glide rate. So, if we want a really slow glide, you can turn that up.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

Or we can turn it almost all the way down.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

That’s sort of what I’m looking for. Okay. So, what we’ve done here is we’ve changed a setting so we can see that this light is now, instead of being blue, it is pink, and that means whatever we have on the panel is the active controls for that. So, let’s get in here a little bit deeper and change a few other things, and I can show you how you can go back and forth between presets and what’s actually set up on your panel. So, first thing, let’s hit the filter section, and what I want to change is the cutoff frequency.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

So, you get a nice fat filter sweep going on in here.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

Let’s get out there, and then start controlling resonance. I hit that.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

Now, I can sweep the filter.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

Punchy resonance. You can also tell that this is a slightly distorted sound. There’s an overload setting on here, and this I think is the money setting on here.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

Right now, that’s set to about a little over one o’clock. I can start to turn that up where I can get a little bit nastier.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

You can also turn it down to clean up the sound a bit and also lose some volume.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

Turn it up and it gets more saturated.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

Definitely a big part of that Moog sound is the overload. Some other things we change on here that will get us dramatic changes, of course, our LFO settings. Right now, we’re set to a square wave, and this LED over here is sort of blinks at the rate. If I were to change the rate, we can see it gets stopped or it goes slower. If we turn it up, it gets faster to where it looks like it’s on all the time. I’m not sure if the camera will pick that up just because of the frame sync rates, but it’s set to a square wave right now, and it’s set to affect the pitch.

The mod wheel on here is always set to control the amount of or the actual amplitude of the LFO, how much LFO is affecting its destination. So, let’s take a listen to how that sounds.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

Okay. Let’s try a different waveform on the LFO.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

So, we got a sawtooth ramp down. Sawtooth ramp up.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

We can also set it to a triangle wave...

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

...for a classic vibrato tone. See if we can turn that up.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

You can start to get some FM modulation going on, some actual frequency modulation.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

We can also set our LFO to be the same as the filter envelope, which we will actually control down here. So, we can send an attack for here, let’s set it sort of on the fast side, decay, make it quick so that it’s a bit more dramatic, sustain bring up, and release we’ll leave about half way up.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

We can also affect these.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

That’s with a slow attack on here.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

Now, with sustain we’re actually setting the destination frequency.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

So, that’s an interesting sound. You can also set it to oscillator two...

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

...so we’re going to get more frequency modulation type things. To control oscillator two, we need to go over here. We control the frequency, the octave. We’ll set the octave low since we’re using it as an LFO or low-frequency oscillator.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

We’ll turn up the -- I’m going to actually set it to the filter.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

We’ll get the amount further up.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

And what we can start doing is changing the waveform to square wave. You can also lower the frequency. I don't know if you can star tot hear that. So, with oscillator two acting as your LFO, there are a lot of different interesting sounds. We can turn up to a really high frequency...,

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

...starting that sort of ring modulation sort of sound.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

I set it to sync.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

That means that oscillator 2 is automatically set to sync -- be in sync with oscillator one at least pitch wise. So, at this sort of difference between our wave that is actually making the sound and our wave that’s acting as an LFO, this is sort of an interesting mix that we can get.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

Okay, let’s check out just more of the sound of your pure oscillators. I’m going to set us back to an LFO with a triangle wave, and actually I’ll just turn off the LFO, and let’s get in here. I’l turn down oscillator one so we’ll just be hearing oscillator two and then see what kind of wave we are working with. So, we can switch continuously between triangle wave to sawtooth to square wave, and then finally at the end there’s pulse width wave. So, let’s hear how that sounds.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

So, we’re actually hearing a little bit of pitch wobble there. It’s to be expected with an analog synth. So, when we’re up here, we hear more overtones. Maybe if I open up the filter a bit, we’ll be able to hear that better.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

There we go. That’s sort of almost like an 8-bit pulse width tone. Here’s our square wave, here’s our sawtooth, and there’s our triangle wave.

All right. Let’s also just check the volume and roll up really quick or just the entire envelope section. So, as with just about any synth, we can increase the attack time to get more of a swell into the note.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

You can hear we have a sort of a decay into a lower volume so it kind of gives you that attack and pulls back a little bit.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

You can shorten that time...

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

...or increase it.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

I’ll pull back a little bit. The sustain is set about halfway up. If you turn this up, you’ll hear more of a swell into it.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

I’ll turn that attack back all the way up, and then we can also add some tail on there with the release.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

You can add sustain a little bit as well.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

All right. So, let’s get into the filter envelope. You can control how much the filter affects or the envelope affects the filter using the envelope generator amount.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

So, this is barely affecting or actually negatively affecting it. This is not affecting it at all.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

And here we have it positively affecting it.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

So there’s positive.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

There’s negative. So, if we go in here, I’m going to start to mess with these settings.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

I’m starting to get some dramatic filter sweeps, especially if I turn up the resonance a little bit.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

Filter sweep sounds pretty good. There’s a little bit of zippering and it’s probably...

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

...has to be the resolution of the digital voltages controlling the cutoff frequency.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

If we turn up the envelope release, the volume envelope, we’ll be able to hear. When we let go of the note, the release time on the filter envelope will change some a bit.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

There we go.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

So, those are basic sort of controls we have on here, and now we’ve gotten really far away from what our preset was. But, if we want to go back, we can just press the preset button.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

It goes right back to our preset. Press it again...,

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING THE MOOG MUSIC LITTLE PHATTY]

It goes back to where we were set on our panel. So, those are basic sounds we can get out of the Little Phatty. There’s some -- It’s a mono synth and it only outputs mono. You can also put in an audio signal in to basically put through the filter, add some distortion to your signal. There’s also control voltage inputs so you can use a foot pedal, you can send it MIDI from a sequencer to control these things. You have that for pitch, volume, filter, and keyboard gate.

So, that is the Moog Little Phatty. It’s a limited edition. This is one of the last ones they’ve put out, so if you get the chance to get your hands on one, I highly recommend it. It’s a great way to introduce yourself to some of the Moog sounds. And if you’re already way into the Moog sounds, it’s a great, easy way to just get your hands in there and get sort of reacquainted with it.