So today I finally received my orange Little Phatty from Sweetwater! SOOOO COOOL, and pretty heavy too! It was troublesome carrying it up to the third floor of my apartment complex!
I’ve been messing around with it for a few hours, and I noticed that when I applied the same factory preset from the Slim Phatty (04 GRINDMYBASS) onto my Little Phatty, it didn’t sound as FULL and it didn’t encompass me in bass. It actually sounded frail and weak in comparison…
…has anyone else come across a situation like this? It could be just me not knowing enough about synthesizers but it seems like my Slim is a lot more PHAT than my LP :[
Erp, okay I’m an idiot. This thing is so awesome. It’s giving me about the same about of bass but it’s just not throwing in as harsh of a sound. It sounds a little less grind-y than the SP, but it still has enough bass. I don’t really know how to describe it, but it still wont give me the same sound.
One reason CAN be that they are slightly different tuned (calibrated), so that the OSC1/2 detune in a preset in one Phatty differs from the detune in another. Have you tried to adjust the OSC 2 Freq to see if you can fix it?
That is just one example of why a preset can sound slightly different between Phattys.
Those who tweak shall find!
I’d be curious to see how your SP would sound next to another SP running the same patch. I may get an SP in the future to experiment with polyphony on my Little Phatty.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but did you manually “copy” the settings from the Slim onto your LP? Or did they both have the same preset already programmed?
If you did it by hand, there are a few things that might be keeping them from sounding the same that aren’t always obvious. One would be that the SP’s patch might be using a different filter pole setting. Check under the Master / Advanced settings on the Slim and see if the Filter Pole is set to anything less than 4. That makes the biggest difference, as a 3, 2, or 1 pole filter has a much less steep cutoff than the default 4 pole setting.
Another thing would be to check the Mod Source settings; the SP might have a second destination selected that’s giving it some character.
While the two instruments might still have a VERY slight difference due to the nature of analog, there really shouldn’t be anything making them sound different. Often the answer lies under the hood in the menus; something I learned years ago when I was in the same situation of trying to create a patch and wondering why mine was so ‘dull’ sounding.
Let me know if any of this was helpful; the LP Stage was my first synth as well, and all the discoveries are still fresh in my mind. Like you, it also made me a bit insane, irrational (I had a Voyager within 3 months), and hermit like which I still haven’t recovered from nearly 4 years later!
component tolerance means every part is only within some small % of “the same” value, comparing one unit to another.
If you want the two to sound identical, you’ll need to dial in one unit by ear to match the other. try small changes to cutoff frequency, osc2 freq, wave shape… the more familiar you are with the sound engine the easier it will be to diagnose what exactly sounds different and what to adjust…
I will give that a go! Thank you very much for the insight! :3
I never thought to check that! I’m still getting the hang of the knobs on the front, I haven’t even thought of screwing around in the Master or Advanced settings! There is so much for this young grasshopper to learn…
Yeah I kind of have a hard time deciding if I would want the Sweetwater orange or the Novamusik red more. Then there are all the Voyager Selects. The Jade and Violet lighting looks great, but there is a version at Nova that has orange lights and rocker switches. Plus blue is my fave color, so the electric blue LED versions are nice. So many choices
Jade Mahogany. Nova used to have black and whitewash ones with red or blue LED’s and matching switches and jacks. I was partial to the whitewash red ones. I am still waiting for a bronze backed LP, before I start worrying about what color LP looks better. I’ve put so much time and money into getting my LP to look like I want it to, I would probably have Amos sign a back panel with the same paint marker he used on my LP, then buy the back panel seperate…but it would have to be a bronze colored panel.
Woah. That’s heavy. 
