Behringer 2600-VCO: An ARP oscillator for your Eurorack

08 Jul 2021 by Robin Vincent | Approximate reading time: 2 Minutes

Behringer 2600-VCO · Source: Behringer 2600-VCO

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Behringer has broken out an oscillator from their ARP 2600 clone and put it into Eurorack form. The 2600-VCO is looking pretty nice.

2600-VCO

This is the sort of module that makes a lot of sense. It’s taken from technology Behringer has already reproduced and offers an authentically desirable sound for Eurorack fiddlers.

It appears to be designed around oscillator 2 or 3 on the 2600 featuring all four waveforms on individual outputs. The only front panel difference being the fine-tune slider becoming a knob and the loss of the Sync switch because it’s no longer hardwired to other oscillators.

You get a wide range of frequencies and you can switch it down into LFO mode which also disconnects the keyboard input.

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FM Control

The FM Control section at the bottom is a little weird but I think after a bit of cross-referencing I’ve got the hang of it. In the 2600 each oscillator has a normalled connection to the output of the Sample & Hold circuit, ADSR envelope, Noise generator and input from another oscillator. The sliders then attenuate the amount of signal being routed to the oscillator. These behind-the-panel connections are broken if you patch in something else and so become frequency modulation inputs. But none of the normalled connections exist when you are taking the oscillator out into isolation like with the 2600-VCO. So in the video these inputs are labelled like the 2600 and are completely wrong, whereas the image on the webpage gets it right.

Behringer 2600-VCO with wrong FM labels in the video · Source: Behringer

However, then you are left with a single 1v/Oct keyboard input and 3 FM inputs which is a little unusual and perhaps unnecessary but I guess it means you can have three different sorts of frequency modulation plugged it at once. The 5th CV input is for Pulse Width Modulation.

So, the 2600-VCO is an authentic-sounding ARP oscillator with 4 waveshapes and an abundance of modulation. It looks great, very ARP-like, although it’s wide at 16HP and could have been more compact if they’d lost 1 or 2 of those extra FM inputs. It’s not a unique idea, the 2600 oscillator is widely copied, most recently by G-Storm Electro who spotted the superfluous FM inputs and scaled it down to 10HP. It’s a decent idea to pull bits out of all the synths they’ve recreated and remodel them as Eurorack modules, but they should pay a little more attention to the details.

The 2600-VCO is shipping from their factory and will be available soon for $99.