Moog Little Phatty - oscillator and filter, how does the output look

To get a feel of how my filter is performing, I took a closer look at the Moog Little Phatty, and how its output looks on the scope.

Waveforms

The LP does not have discrete selectable waveforms. Instead, it has a continously changeable waveform that starts as a triangle wave, goes through saw and sqare and then ends up as a pulse wave.

This is what it looks like when turning:

Here are the four variations that most closely resembles the four mentioned waveforms:

Pulse wave. Notice how it is no longer centered around 0V - instead, the TOP is at 0V.

There are two things to notice:

First of all, the wave is not straight, it curves slightly. The triangle wave is actually on its way to becoming a sine wave, and the saw wave is almost like a half sine with an abrupt but not instant fall to the bottom. These photos are taken at a rather high frequency, but the effect becomes even more pronounced as the frequency drops. This means that the perceived level of the triangle wave is significantly lower than that of the other waveforms, just like with a sine wave. It also probably introduces different overtones than the waveforms from a 'cleaner' waveshaper does, which may greatly affect the character of the synth. Interesting!

Second, the wave is not always centered around 0V. This is something I've wondered a lot about after looking at various service manuals - a lot of them use a capacitor to center the wave, which means that waves with uneven energy levels above and below 0V would end up not being sentered. This is clearly the case with the LP - look at the photo of the pulse wave above, it has its TOP at 0V. This is fine and inaudible as long as the output does not start clipping, and mixing multiple oscillators that are not synced would probably reduce the offset. Still, it's interesting to see that this is actually done in professional instruments. I worked hard on my waveshaper to prevent this, perhaps it's unnecessary.

Resonance and self oscillation amplitude

Here is a video of what happens when I turn on resonance with the cutoff set to max. I then gradually reduce the cutoff to introduce self oscillation:

As you can see, the amplitude is quickly reduced to less than 50%. Then, when adding self oscillation, the self oscillation has an amplitude closer to (but less than) the original signal. It never overpowers the original:

Original wave, no resonance

Full resonance and filter fully open

Cutoff turned down, filter is self oscillating

Resonance pot response

In my last post I explained how I found that the resonance CV for the juno filter definitely not was exponential, but not sure if reverse exponential (using a reverse log pot) or linear was the best. Here is how the LP responds:

All pics are taken with the cutoff slightly higher than middle. Self resonance becomes visible about when the pot pointing to the right. This is independent of cutoff, and is fairly similar to the linear pot in my Juno VCF circuit.

Oscillator mixing

The little phatty has two oscillators. I would expect mixing them to simply sum them up, but it seems the total is less than the sum. I did the summing by running two similar waveforms on both oscillators and synching oscillator 1 and 2. The sum reached it's peak with oscillator 1 at 100% and oscillator 2 at 50%, after this further summing only changed the shape of the output slightly. It seems to me that the synth does some soft clipping or similar, which becomes more apparent when using overload.

Overload

Overload increases the amplitude of the signal. At first it appeared that it only doubled the amplitude:

But when lowering the cutoff and then turning on overload, we see that the wave is heavily distorted:

Switching to a different waveform shows this even more. It seems that the actual amplification is much more than doubled, but that the Little Phatty uses something like a compander/limiter circuit to soft clip the output (or maybe not - it starts stretching long before the edges reach the peak) - see how the middle of the wave is much more amplified than the top/bottom:

Overloading a triangle wave:

Overloading a saw wave: