The COCO Series
COCO – Create your Own Complex Oscillator
With the COCO series the aim is to bring all the goodness of a complex oscillator while aiming to minimize some of the downsides. The main thing that I appreciate about complex oscillators is that you can have a lot of fun without having to patch too much. By default, you can get some very deep sounds that go far beyond the standard bleep and bloop. On the downside, complex oscillators are big and have a fixed set of capabilities.
The COCO series allows you to choose your oscillator features and choose your control module and connect them all together into a complex oscillator. You can then break them down and each module also works as a standalone module as well. So when you need that extra oscillator for your performance case, you can break the system down and use it accordingly.
Oscillators
You can connect up to a total of three oscillators in a complete COCO system. It is recommended to have at least two or it will not be much fun as a system. The typical configuration would be having one Cascades and two Brooks.
Each oscillator in the COCO series can send and receive Exp FM, sync, and a MOD wave.
For Exp FM (v/oct) and sync, the routing is controlled by the control module via the Track and Sync switches. The exp FM routing is handy for doing chords without having to worry about copying precision voltages. Everything is internally routed with high precision op amps.
MOD wave - Each oscillator controls what it sends as a modulation wave. Cascades has a jumper on the back to change between SIN and MOR outputs, while Brooks will always send SIN. Each oscillator then has an arrow next to each jack that receives a MOD wave signal. One twist on this is that Canyon can also be configured to send it's mix output as the MOD wave to OSC1, instead of receiving from OSC2. This is because the stepped voltage patterns that come from Canyon can be quite fun to use on an oscillator!
Cascades - Cascades is the fully featured thru-zero oscillator with an octave switch, voltage-controlled wave shaping (via Morph), amplitude modulation, along with a large variety of waveform ouptuts. A notable oddity is the inclusion of the COS output, which is great for some stereo effect. The idea being that Cascades works best as a main oscillator. But you can use either oscillator in any position in the overall system.
Brooks - Brooks is a smaller thru-zero 4hp basic VCO that has all the basic waveforms, FM control, sync, and Time Reverse which simply reverses the wave. While it is a fully capable oscillator it works best as a modulation oscillator in the COCO system.
Control Modules
The control modules do two things in the system, they control the routing for the exp FM and sync, and they add either upper (Valley) or lower (Canyon) harmonics. The switches control the routing of exp fm and sync between the oscillators, while only Canyon has any mod bus controls, which is available as a jumper on the back.
Valley - Valley is a wavefolder (aka adds upper harmonics) that offers some mixing at the input, along with controls over order (number of folds) and control over even or odd harmonics (more details). This is meant to be the opposite of the grit in Dirty Laundry and aims to be a nice clean wavefolder.
Canyon - Canyon is a sub-harmonics generator (aka add lower harmonics). You can think of it as a level-controlled clock divider where each knob controls the level of a sub-division (three is 1/3, five is 1/5, etc.). You can then either output just the odds or the evens via dedicated jacks or have a crossfade between the two. The clock that is being sub-divided can be changed for the odds and evens sides independently so you can get some wonky cross modulation effects.
Everyone always loves a little dessert, and that's kinda where SUM+INV comes in. It's a little utility that is helpful in two ways for COCO. First, you can use it as a 3:1 mixer by patching the top two inputs and the bottom input. This is handy when trying to mix your three oscillator outputs. Second, it can be helpful for quadrature output with the SIN and COS feeding each channel and therefore giving you 0, 90, 180, and 270 phases.