Astonishingly Sophisticated Sound-Generation

Braids, by French Eurorack pioneers Mutable Instruments, is not an oscillator.

It sort of looks like one, with fine and coarse pitch/frequency controls, a v/oct input, and voltage-controllable tone/timbre controls.

It even sort of sounds like one, in as far as it outputs audio.

Mutable Instruments call it a macro oscillator, but even that is an understatement. It’s a hugely sophisticated digital synthesis engine, able to produce and manipulate complex sounds – classic waves from vintage synths, bells, resonant filters, plucked and bowed strings, vocals and vowel/formant sounds, wind instruments, percussion, noise, granular clouds and more – by means of 45 or so fully-realized algorithms, featuring multiple oscillators, wavetables, filters, VCAs, ring modulators, and so on under the hood. 

Each mode is a different algorithm, and produces a different variety of sounds as you turn the two tone controls, Timbre and Colour. These controls are pre-programmed to do different things per algorithm, often adjusting multiple parameters in the set-up at once to tour the sweet spots. And of course they can be CV controlled.

Using the trigger input and built-in AD envelope, each algorithm can even become a self-contained synth voice. No other modules required. But bring other modules in and you can make pretty much any instrument you could imagine.

In a sense, Braids can be looked at as both an encyclopedia of classic synthesis techniques, and a tool to bring them into the present-day, with tremendous sound-quality and ease-of-use to match.

It is also shockingly, spectacularly rich, varied, and complicated, with each mode being an instrument unto itself. 
So read the Softube Plug-ins Manual 
…or Mutable Instruments’ own information on the hardware here – mutable-instruments.net​/modules​/braids 
…or check out Bob Borries’ excellent unofficial diagrammatic manual here – www.vo1t.com​/Euro​/BraidsIllustrated1.8.pdf 
…or watch this comprehensive video runthrough from Future Music – youtu.be​/QgeCO1DD2wA

In short