The Little Phatty is the next great thing to emerge from the revitalized Moog Music synthesizer company. It is sort of a notch below the Voyager, but should not really be categorized as such because the Little Phatty is a powerful synth with a layout and design that looks less into the past and more towards the future.

The Little Phatty boasts a 100 percent analog signal path, 100 user editable presets and a 37-note keyboard. It is a monophonic synth with two oscillators (the Voyager has three osc). Waveform selector is continuously variable between waveforms (tri, saw, square, pulse) and there is oscillator-sync. The filter is the classic Moog ladder design. Two ADSR envelope generators are available for the volume and the filter. And finally a nice LFO with six waveshapes, four destinations and rate/depth controls helps to get things moving. The 'Master' section of the keyboard has controls for Tuning, +/-2 Octave Transpose, Glide, Pitch/Mod wheels and some data entry controls. There are no on-board sequencers or effects, however.

The interface couldn't be simpler and despite the minimized number of buttons and knobs, there are no hidden pages or sub-layers of button functions - all controls are still very hands-on and provide excellent visual feedback via two-tone back-lit buttons, dials and pitch bend / mod wheels. Beautiful, hand-built, simple, effective, powerful - classic Moog design. The Little Phatty is designed to offer a 21st century analog Moog synthesizer in a compact portable package and at a price every musician can afford.

The standard edition is the Stage model (pictured top). Moog initially released a special, limited edition run of 1,200 individually numbered Bob Moog Tribute Edition synths. The limited run, Tribute Edition of the Little Phatty (pictured above) has special Moog wood side panels, a Bob Moog signature plate across the front and rear, comes with a CD-ROM featuring highlights of the Bob Moog Memorial Celebration Service and a special Bob Moog poster.

OK so they aren't that cheap. And they aren't very feature-rich compared with some of its competitors. But it is a genuine Moog. Its sound engine was designed by the late and great Bob Moog himself. It's the final synth he built for us. And it simply sounds amazing! It's analog but with such ultra-stability and such a modern and expressive interface, using the Little Phatty is an absolute joy - for experimenting, learning, jamming and having fun - it's one of the best 21st century synths for analog basses, leads, effects, noises and more.

Joe Schmoe

April 26, 2010 @ 10:42 am

To John: both you and VSE are correct - the Stage and Tribute versions of this synth do not have arpeggiators (those are the two featured in this article). The newer Stage IIs have an arpeggiator.

John

April 18, 2010 @ 6:31 am

Great little machine, one of the most easiest logical layouts ever, has the functionability of digital yet the sound of analog, love it :D

Andy Phipps

March 27, 2010 @ 4:49 pm

I managed to pick up a used, Stage I edition from Guitar Center this past winter for $850- brought it home and noticed that the tag on it listed the serial as #00088 so it's the 88th one made from the first run- incredible! Aside from that. this is an amazing sounding synth that is more or less reminiscent of the portable compact synths Moog built in the late 70s, early 80s like The Rogue- it lays down clean, fat sounds and is a dream to gig with.

jay

March 10, 2010 @ 1:07 pm

this synth is interstellar! It rocks my world, only problem is the menu system is a little tedious. The 2.1 system update is fantastic, you can load an arpeggiator, not many other analogue synths can do that!

Christopher Winkels

February 26, 2010 @ 10:16 pm

A great little synth. It's cleanly laid out, and has a full, open sound. There's tremendous scope for everything from a very raw, ballsy sounds to mellow tones. I especially love the switchable filter poles (one, two, three or four poles), which open up the sound palette massively. The controllable overdrive is a nice touch as well, and I don't find myself missing additional knobs since 90% of the sound programming options are only one button press away. Having said that, I do wish the noise and filter pole controls were moved to the front panel instead of being buried in the menus. I also find the requirement that PWM be mapped to both oscillators simultaneously a bit annoying, but these are minor quibbles, since the continuously variable waveshapes give a lot of scope.

Also worth noting is the great tactile quality of the pitch and mod wheels.

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