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Hi Sacguy71,

I fully agree here with Farkas. One can't say, if you have (just an example here) more than 10 oscillators but only 4 VCAs then you don't have enough VCAs... it's not that straight forward. It depends completely on the patch you are currently busy with and if you feel that you are missing a few VCAs and that kind of feeling/experience repeats with other new patches then indeed it's time to get a few more VCAs :-)

But if you insist on checking on the oscillators per VCA rate... I don't feel it's "fair" (for calculation purposes) to count percussion/drum modules as an oscillator as well. So if you stick to pure oscillators versus VCAs only...

Ha, ha, very coincidentally I am exactly to a 1:1 rate, so my number of oscillators is, at my current setup, exactly (not even a difference of one) the same as my number of VCAs; interesting/funny exercise. The way I counted is for VCAs: I only count pure VCAs, no overdrives, no mixers that have VCA functionality in them, though a dual VCA I count for 2, a quad for 4, etcetera. The same for the VCOs/DCOs, no matter if they have multiple outputs, I just count them as one unless it's a dual VCO then I counted it for 2, etcetera. As mentioned as well, I didn't count other modules like drums/percussion and sample modules as being an oscillator, otherwise I would have a bit more than VCAs indeed.

Though, again I don't think you should approach it this way.

For my own setup I sometimes still feel I have too less VCAs; recently I bought a few extra VCAs because before that I definitely had too less VCAs. Now slowly I feel it's time to get a few more oscillators ;-) You should follow your guts when you are patching! If you are during patching in the urge of some more VCAs and you ran out of them... well, that seems a clear signal to me that you need more VCAs, and vice versa of course if you feel you have a lack of oscillators.

Good luck with the module planning and kind regards, Garfield.