The ARP 2600 is for many the holy grail among synthesizers. Big and mighty in sound and its dimensions, the instrument has always inspired listeners and users alike. With the 2600 Gray Meanie, Behringer has brought back a primeval rock of synthesizer history and shrunk it down to a manageable size in one go.
The instrument is littered with sliders and is more than comprehensively equipped with three analog oscillators, a switchable lowpass filter, mixer, two envelopes, LFO, VCA, spring reverb, ring modulator, noise generator, sample & hold, voltage processor and envelope follower.
The three analogue oscillators deliver an impressive sound foundation and can be adjusted continuously over a very wide frequency range. While the first oscillator makes do with sawtooth and square, the other two additionally deliver sine and triangle. Complex modulations to the tone generators are done in no time. Additionally, there is a ring modulator and a noise generator with crossfadeable character. It is possible to feed two oscillators with square waveform into the open sample & hold circuit and thus create analog bitcrush! Once all sound sources have been matched in the mixer, they converge in the lowpass filter. Behringer has integrated both filter generations that ARP had built in at the time. 4012 corresponds to the classic Moog filter with smooth resonance, 4072 is the typical ARP filter with grainy resonance. The end of the signal chain is the stereo VCA with panorama control and the wonderful rattling spring reverb effect, which contributes to the vintage sound of the Behringer 2600.
The 2600 Analog Synthesizer as a whole is a guarantee for varied sounds that should appeal to experimental musicians and producers alike. This is not only due to all the tone generating and shaping elements, but also to the flexible possibilities to combine, mix and bend tones and modulations. What can't be done directly, i.e. pulling up a fader, can be modified via the Voltage Processor matching. In addition, there is nothing to stop you from sending the LFO through the ring modulator together with the sample & hold and controlling the filter cutoff with the ring-modulated CV.
The 2600 is semi-modular; this means that some connections, for example from the oscillator to the mixer, are internal, but if you need a different signal, you simply patch it in. The same applies to all modulations: if a different control voltage source or a variant of it is needed, additional patch cables are used. Helpful here is also the label on each socket, which signal is present there by default.
Thanks to the preamp and envelope follower, the instrument can be used perfectly for processing other sources like a drum machine. The synthesizer part can be completely integrated: the CV output of the envelope follower opens the VCA and at the same time controls the pitch of the oscillator that modulates the filter. All this can then be distributed in the panorama and chased through the spring reverb.