Moog Music Forum

I'm copying this query and my response from the Knob Tweak mailing list at Yahoo. Feel free to add, modulate, or correct:

I find it quite difficult to make 'nice/beautiful' sounds on the SP. I end up with lotsa sounds i´d get from my MS20. I´m trying to get some creamy nice moog leads, but that's some hard work.

My patches tend toward the very simple, so I rarely save patches. But let me offer two suggestions.

1. Have you installed the computer editor? It comes with quite a few user patches, including a large batch from this chap here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV9-DNTtKk0

2. Here are some things that I've found helpful in getting "nice" sounds from the Sub Phatty:

• Keep the sound focused. Turn the sub oscillator all the way down. Detune OSC2 only slightly. And -- this is important, I think -- modulate the wave form by a small amount, if at all. Note also there's an under-the-hood setting to oscillate just one waveform, not both.
• With low resonance, you can afford to turn the oscillator volumes down in the mixer. With high resonance, you'll want to turn them up again.
• Glide settings between 2 and 5 can add to the cream.
• We think of triangle waves as sounding boring, but our Sub Phatties have a good range of sounds between triangle and saw that sound very nice. Try using this area for one oscillator or both.
• Conversely, I like the far end of square waveform for leads.
• There's nothing wrong with using one oscillator all by itself.

those are all very good tips!

dswo wrote:With low resonance, you can afford to turn the oscillator volumes down in the mixer.

i think this is a particularly important point:
be very careful with what you're doing in the mixer section!
especially when using more than one osc, don't turn any of the osc mixer knobs higher than 5 or 6, unless you want saturation/distortion.

it's the same with the arturia microbrute/minibrute: when people complain that they tend to sound 'harsh' or 'brutal', i think that's mostly because they crank up the knobs in the waveform mixer too high and get distortion - which can be useful for some sounds, but not when you're looking for gentle sounds.

and of course, on the sub phatty/sub 37, be extremely careful with that 'multidrive' knob (and on the s37, 'fdbk')!

for my taste, many of the sub37's factory presets use too high osc levels, and too much 'fdbk' and 'multitrive'. they seem to be designed to be very in ya face rather than nice and subtle.

There is a ton of softness under the SubP hood.
On mine i kept the mix levels around 12 oclock, Sub Osc level lower, reso low and multidrive off for smoother sounds. Also use 24dB filter poles and dont open cutoff fully. For soft basses use only one Osc, plus a bit sub osc, for leads add some really slow LFO to detune very slightly one Osc to get a nice organic sound. For pads tune both Osc one octave or less apart from each other and change envelope settings.

Thanks for taking my question to a broader audience DSWO!

I do use the editor a lot. I've been editing the SP for quite some hours the last week and i always use the editor to do a few steps:
1. Load my home made init patch to start from scratch
2. Edit the under the hood controls, because i tend to use them a lot (extra env settings en osc/lfo reset are my most used ones)
3. Save a patch when i like it on the SP
4. Get patch from moog to editor, rename and save on my computer

I've managed to make some creamy sounds, using mostly one osc and use the 2nd one for a low volume detuning to get some movement in the sound without changing the timbre.
I found out that using the resonance at around 7-9 oclock is good for killing some bass, otherwise the sounds are too phat

Hey guys... I'm the chap from tip #1.

These are useful tips for bringing some smoother sounds from the Sub. If you take a look to some of my softer sounds, you'll see that controlling OSC levels is very important. Other than that, MULTIDRIVE with up to 1-2, can add a lot of great harmonics and make it sound less predictable.

To me, my LP can make some warmer sounds, due to inherent filter character. In the Sub, resonance must be used with caution and low levels. If used with high values it gets thinner and looses a lot of low-end.

Anyway, I can't add much to what dswo already said.

Cheers!

Thanks for all these perfect tips!

IgorCristo wrote:MULTIDRIVE with up to 1-2, can add a lot of great harmonics and make it sound less predictable.

Yes, Multidrive isn't just for extreme wailing; in small amounts it adds real warmth.