The objective of this paper is to characterize dynamic pressure traces measured at self-excited combustion instabilities occurring in two combustion systems of different hardware. One system is a model lean premixed gas turbine combustor and the other a fullscale bipropellant liquid rocket thrust chamber. It is commonly observed in both systems that low frequency waves at around 300㎐ are first excited at the onset of combustion instabilities and after a short duration, the instability mode becomes coupled to the resonant acoustic modes of the combustion chamber, the first longitudinal mode for the lean premixed combustor and the first tangential mode for the rocket thrust chamber. Low frequency waves seem to get excited at first since flame shows the higher heat release response on the lower frequency perturbations with the smaller phase differences between heat release and pressure fluctuations. Nonlinear time series analysis of pressure traces reveals that even stable combustion might have chaotic behavior with the positive maximum Lyapunov exponent. Also, pressure fluctuations under combustion instabilities reach a limit cycle or quasi-periodic oscillations at the very similar run conditions, which manifest that a self-excited high frequency instability has strong nonlinear characteristics.