Moog Sub Phatty

Everything new is well forgotten old

Sub Phatty is a rather interesting attempt by Moog to reinvent the classic analogue synthesizer in a modern way. Outwardly, it is very reminiscent of the classic MiniMoog with its sleek design and huge rotary controls. Only instead of red and brown shades, Sub Phatty is painted in silver. The keyboard is traditionally excellent: full-sized, responsive, sensitive to touch force and with aftertouch support. Well, the overall quality of materials and assembly is traditionally cosmic. This will stand in the studio in 10 and 20 years.

Signature Moog Sound

The interesting begins with a closer acquaintance. Sub Phatty starts with a pair of classic oscillators that have been given a waveshaping feature. Now, instead of crossing the usual sine wave, saw and square, the user can play enough with the timbres at the initial stage. The sound then enters a new multidrive filter that adds warmth at low drive levels and creates a “screaming” effect at high drive levels that is heavily influenced by resonance, waveform and oscillator level. On their own, the combination of two main oscillators, a sub-oscillator, a noise generator, and a multi-drive filter are capable of producing sounds of the widest spectrum. Although, first of all, Sub Phatty is loved for its “fat” and deep basses.

Connecting external instruments

If you get tired of playing with the built-in sound sources, you can connect an external instrument to Sub Phatty using the audio output — a guitar, keyboards or other synthesizer. And then play with the legendary filter frequency, resonance, drive or filter envelope. It turns out a pleasant analogue "warming" and "compacting" of the sound.

Expensive

In our opinion, the main problem with Sub Phatty is the price. Yes, it's a great analogue take on the legendary Moog sound, but apart from the sound, it doesn't offer anything particularly interesting. No arpeggiator, no built-in sequencer, modulation matrix or effects unit like more affordable analogue machines from Arturia, Korg or Roland. Therefore, Sub Phatty is worth recommending to those who are primarily looking for a powerful analogue sound and, most likely, are a fan of Moog. Well, it is also perfect for beginners: it is easy to tame it and it is almost impossible to squeeze a bad sound out of it.