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When Bob Moog died in 2005 he left behind a legacy of a life dedicated to the study of Electronic music and instrument design. His success is clear to see, not just in terms of the sales of Moog products themselves but also in the clear awe and wonder the names of his more famous creations continue to inspire.

Perhaps most famous of all is the Minimoog but it's fair to say that in the years before his death, Moog's stock was on a high with 2002's Minimoog Voyager a hugely popular synth for those with deep enough pockets.

The very last instrument Bob worked on before his untimely death was the portable Little Phatty which features a three-octave keyboard, a classic Moog analogue signal path and a healthy smattering of 21st Century refinements, including USB compatibility and MIDI control messages transmitted from its front-panel dials.

"Overload super-charges the filter's response and is capable of doing the most damage to your speakers."

The Little Phatty is a glorious instrument and one that we were lucky enough to review upon its release. We fell in love with it to such an extent that our reviewer went out and bought one.

So we were both interested and intrigued to see whether the recent announcement of a yet more compact, desktop module synthesizer based on the same sound engine could provide as much bang for its correspondingly reduced buck. Enter the Slim Phatty.

Fatboy slim

The Slim Phatty is a wedge-shaped, chunky desktop module which will either sit proudly upon your desktop or which can be adorned with 19-inch rack ears or even wooden end-cheeks if you're feeling posh (both available optionally and at extra cost).

The rear-panel houses the connection ports for headphones as well as audio in and out, volume, pitch and filter CV inputs, a Gate input, MIDI In, Out and Thru ports and the all-important USB connector.

The Slim Phatty continues the Moog tradition (since the original Minimoog) of offering its control set at a steep, near 45-degree angled front-panel. The control panel is a perfect replica of that featured on the Little Phatty, albeit with both buttons and dials smaller than those on the keyboard-based big brother and with slightly adjusted colour coding on the buttons.

First up you'll find the master section directly below the screen, while the main synth section spreads logically out to the right hand side. The first module deals with the oscillators with a shared waveform dial accessible by each of the two oscillators in turn.

Four waveforms are available to either oscillator with shapes of triangle, saw, square and narrow pulse but what's unique about the oscillator stage is that these shapes are continuously variable so that rather than selecting one waveform or another via a knob 'clunk', you can select intermediate waveforms between the shapes, which opens up unique sonic possibilities.

Once you've selected waveforms for each of the two oscillators, you can choose their octaves, independently fine tune them, sync oscillator 1's output to that of oscillator 2 and, of course, tweak the Glide control if you want to create portamento effects, which work particularly well on searing leads or liquid bass sounds.

In the modern era of plug-in synths offering multiple sound sources, internal effects at the oscillator stage and all manner of other high-tech wizardry, these might seem modest controls for sound building but that's to ignore decades of Moog's work as pioneers of synthesizer design.

Filter ladders

After the oscillator section you'll find the same classic 24dB-per-octave low-pass filter which features on the Little Phatty. In combination with the biting resonance control, this will take care of your tone shaping needs and represents a huge part of the classic Moog sound.