Packed with three swaggering VCOs
Outfitted with three VCOs, the Behringer 2600 Gray Meanie boasts the signature girthsome tone of its predecessor, which lends itself to brutal bass sounds, gritty leads, and crystalline plucks. VCO1 features independent sawtooth and pulse wave outputs. While VCO2 and VCO3 furnish independent outputs for triangle, sawtooth, sine, and pulse wave (with pulse width modulation), as well as oscillator sync. Additionally, you can set all three oscillators to low-frequency mode for use as LFOs to modulate the 2600 Gray Meanie’s myriad parameters, and they have numerous CV inputs for frequency modulation via LFO, sample & hold, ADSR envelope, and more.
A tale of two filter circuits
The Behringer 2600 Gray Meanie comes with not one, but two selectable lowpass voltage-controlled filter circuits: the 4012 and 4072. Though these are both 4-pole resonant filters, they have some significant sonic differences. Featured on all of the 2600 revisions up to 1976, including the 2601 Rev 1, the 4012 filter has a similar disposition to a certain legendary ladder filter. Chock-full of growling attitude with a greasy resonance, it’s an absolute monster.
Introduced on the 2601 Rev 2 in 1977, the 4072 is a more laid-back variant. It features a lower maximum cutoff frequency than the 4012 (11kHz versus 16kHz) with a smooth resonance, ideal for more refined bass patches and swells. And, like all of the 2600’s modules, the VCF’s parameters are controllable by hand or CV control through its corresponding inputs.