I love LOVE the sound of my Sub Phatty. It has some of the creaminess of the old Taurus combined with some of the funk from the mini plus its own flavors on top. I really do like it.
However, after a few weeks with it, I am being driven to the brink of insanity by the hidden settings. I hate them beyond words, especially because there’s no visible indication of what is set.
I’ll be messing with a sound just in panel mode. At some point, I realize it just doesn’t sound like I expected, or sound the way the panel did yesterday. So then I have to go into the hidden functions (I always have to use the cheat sheet as I forget which of the function buttons does what) and change the filter to 24db because it turns out it was reset to something else. This happens again and again. You’d think I’d learn, but it just doesn’t fit the workflow. Remember, I’m not starting from another patch here, I’m in panel mode.
Either the poles get changed on power down, or they’re saved with presets and then get stuck in that position when you switch to panel mode. I assume the latter. I don’t really use the presets at this point, I use the panel mode. Short of making sure every preset is changed to 24db 4 pole, is there any way around this? Like automatically going to some nice known blank slate whenever I hit “Activate Panel”? Do I have to remember to save a blanked preset and always hit that before hitting “Activate panel”?
The worst thing is there is absolutely nothing on the panel that tells me that a given hidden function is set to a certain value. How on earth do people deal with this live? What happens if the keyboard is transposed? You can’t just hit a random note to make sure the setting is correct. It makes me want to hack the thing to install some LEDs that tell me what filter pole setting is active, what the transpose is, etc. (and other settings which I assume get saved with the patch).
And no, I’m not going to have the PC editor up all the time for this. I bought the Sub Phatty for the sound and the hands-on interface.
Love this post. It reminds me of why I didn’t jump up and grab one of these when they first announced them. An overlay would definitely be a useful thing to have: a clear piece of plastic with cutouts for switches, knobs and buttons you put over the faceplate before a show to tell you what thing does what under the hood.
That would definitely help, but the more important issue is that the overlay couldn’t tell you what’s already set. Imagine getting up on stage and not realizing the filter poles were set to 1pole 6db. Or worse: the tech had accidentally hit the combination to transpose the keyboard. You don’t know what’s going on until you hit a note, and the process to recover from that is you either play in a different key yourself, or you have to monkey with remembering the right key presses.
I still love the sound, but the hidden settings are decidedly unfriendly. I’d be ok with them if they were for truly secondary things, but if you look at the number of parameters, many of them are pretty critical to the sound and performance. The filter db/poles is the one I keep running into.
As an aside, that filter pole setting is going to make the Sub Phatty crap to demo in show room floors. Customers will think the filter has no balls or doesn’t sound “Moogish” enough. There’s even a demo in youtube from a music store where he didn’t realize he was in 12db/2 pole the whole time.
“Initialize Preset” is particularly handy for instantly returning to a default set of settings, including 4-pole filter mode.
also - what’s happening to you is a bug, where Panel Mode is inheriting the hidden settings from whatever preset you were in before you switched into panel mode. It’s totally not supposed to do that, and it’s no wonder it’s driving you batty.
This has been fixed in the new firmware which was just put into production… you can download it here if you like:
after the firmware update is successful, be sure to turn the Sub Phatty power off and then on again; some of the envelope settings require a restart after the firmware update before they will initialize properly.
I’ve had to keep that cheat sheet PDF up and open for a couple weeks now. Someone on GearSlutz pointed it out to me after they noticed my filter was not 24db in a demo I did.
Firmware: I’ll update shortly. Thanks. However, this is not called out as a fixed issue in the readme.
Glad to see the MIDI problem related to the filter cutoff is also fixed in that version. I’ve had to keep the MIDI cable disconnected from the SP for that reason.
Assuming the firmware fixes it, it will certainly save some hair on my head. The underlying issue of “no visible indication” still applies, but I suspect it’ll be less of an issue to me at that point. Still, getting up on stage only to find out your keyboard was transposed would suck in a huge way. It would be a wonderfully evil thing for bandmates to do to each other before a show
I have done a way around this. Since I start my sounds with the panel active, I decided that for a “live” situation, templates would work really nice. And it does! I saved a few sounds in the bank 4 that can be used to start new patches, with filter open, only one osc on the mixer, standard ADSR setting… what’s different is just the hidden parameters not accessible thru the panel (like filter poles, legato glide,…). It makes the whole proccess of creating sounds a lot faster.
I understand your pain… I’m not a huge fan of the hidden features tweak-wise, but I’m really happy that they exist. It makes the Sub even more powerful than it is and really expand the sonic possibilities. With the lauch of the Editor you’ll also be able to change these parameters quickly enough, and will also be able to save an infinite number of presets… all of this for free!!! I’m doing the beta test and it works better than I thought, with everything really accessible and easy to understand.
the “activate panel” works as it’s own preset for the “under the hood” settings.
for example, if your turn “OSC2 BEAT FREQ” to 100% when “activate panel” is lit then you have essentially “saved” the setting for “OSC2 BEAT FREQ” to the “ACTIVATE PANEL” preset at 100%.
if you then load a preset “BANK1/PATCH1” and it has “OSC2 BEAT FREQ” at 50%, and then go back to “ACTIVATE PANEL” the “OSC2 BEAT FREQ” will go back to 100%.
so if you were to have all the settings “under the hood” at neutral settings. you could always go back to those neutral settings by hitting “activate panel”
on the same note, if you set the filter to 2-pole when “activate panel” is lit, it will stay on “2-pole” when “activate panel” is lit until you change it.
what you could do is have the “under the hood” settings at neutral, then save the “activate panel” settings to a bank/patch and then tweak away from a clean start to that new preset. just remember to save your bank/patch again when you have finished.
i think it has been designed well, albiet has a steep learning curve. but given the cost vs functionality i think it has been designed very well, and given the sounds you can get out of it, it stands head and shoulders above any other “new” sounds synth on the market.
i was thinking of making an arduino controller for the under the hood settings. but you are still left with the problem of not knowing were the knobs are set on your presets for the main panel.
i think for live use you need to just rely on your presets and know how the sound of each one is shaped from memory/experience.
i made a max for live panel so i could easily see how presets were made, but you could just as easily use the official librarian when it is released.
i would suggest you work with the librarian to sculpt your presets.
I haven’t yet loaded the new firmware, but what you described is not how my Sub Phatty works. Hopefully it will work like that once I put the firmware on it later tonight.
Librarian: I’m not keen on more beta software at the moment (my OS and half my programs are beta). However, if I want to use the librarian, where would I even go to get it? It’s not on moogmusic.com and I don’t see it here. I checked the thread on beta feedback, and it’s just feedback, not info on how to get the librarian.
Thanks. The beta feedback threads should be private then, to avoid confusion.
I’m not sure what firmware I have. I got the Sub Phatty new, so I assume it’s running 1.0.0. There’s a link to the 1.4 firmware earlier in this thread. Sounds like that is released.
From some brief testing, it appears that the 1.4.0 firmware has fixed the issue where the filter settings comes from the preset. Excellent!
In return, a patch something like a classic electric piano without quite the same envelope. A strange patch for a mono, but still fun and shows the flexibility of the SP.
Oscillator 1
16’, wave set to sawtooth
Oscillator 2
2’, in-tune, wave set to square
Mixer
Osc1 : 4, Sub: 7.6, Osc2: 10, Noise: 0
Filter
Cutoff: at about 11:00
Resonance: 3
Multidrive: at 12:00
EG amount: +1
KB amount: 4.5
Filter Envelope
A: 0, D: 10ms, S: 0, R: 0
Amp Envelope
A: 0, D: at 12:00, S: 5, R: 0
Octave set to +2
Glide set to 0
Modulation (Optional)
I have mine set to filter at 6.5 and Wave at 4, source is triangle and rate is 0.2
No hard sync or pitch amount
As is typical on this, playing with waveform and filter cutoff can produce some other nice sounds.
As far as I know that’s not an official stable release yet. Amos hopes 1.4.0 is the final beta firmware, but he’s been saying that about quite a few beta releases now.
Yes and you can just applaud him for his fast and efficient work (as well as the other member of the Moog Team that are not often as Amos on the forum)!
Never seen an ASS like Moog’s one. The best !
We just have to be a little bit patient for the final firmware/editor versions.
And for your problem about the “under the hood features”, Psych , you can use your SubPhatty with a computer and the Editor it help a lot to make sounds faster and have a visual feedback of these “under the hood features”.
My feelings exactly. People give Moog a hard time about the price premium for their products, but the Sub Phatty and the Minitaur do not stint on features. Moog has packed a lot of sound into these affordable little boxes.
Do you have an iPod/iPhone? If so, you could download TouchOSC (5 bucks) and I’ll send you the control panel that I made. It will let you control all the hidden parameters like the Editor does. Couple that with an iRig (60-70 bucks) and you got a pretty standalone solution.
The next step would be to build a little hardware box for those settings…
Hi SUBB ~ I have TouchOSC loaded on an iPad 2, but have never really used it, and imagined I probably never would now that Logic Pro X includes an iPAD app called “REMOTE” which automagically does what TouchOSC was supposed to do (though I am far more comfortable in LP9 and have barely scratched LPX surface yet) ~ would really like to see your control panel, however
Alright I’ll try to fix it (some control are incorrectly assigned) and I’ll make a new thread to share it with everybody. Also I’ll see if I can add a fetch button to ask the Sub to send its parameters so they can be displayed on the control panel.
Agreed, but realize that just isn’t always the right mode of operation for this. I use a fair bit of software, but that’s usually with my eyes on the screen and my hands on the controller. With the Sub Phatty, I want my eyes on the hardware. Also: the live performance issues I brought up.
The firmware update with the filter poles fixed really helped. However, I thought the filter (or amp, not sure) envelope stayed on repeat the other day once I hit panel mode. I need to double-check that.
On a majorly interesting plus side: I forgot and left my Slim Phatty on and didn’t assign its MIDI input correctly, I noticed that the controls on the Sub Phatty were all we very nicely mapped to the Slim Phatty. It’s almost a one-knob-per-function controller for it (minus features not present on one or the other).
An overlay would definitely be a useful thing to have: a clear piece of plastic with cutouts for switches, knobs and buttons you put over the faceplate before a show to tell you what thing does what under the hood. 