Oscillator deflater

With the function generator not being much use, It's clear that the starting point for this beast has to be the VCO (Voltage Controlled Oscillator). A quick look online for some VCO schematics throws up circuits like this:

Which is all fine and dandy, but possibly a little complex as a starting point given that my electronics experience up to this point includes making an LED flash on and off in a year 9 physics class and soldering a resistor into an Xbox DVD drive to flash the firmware.

I'd best start with something simpler then.

Found this site on my travels: Experimentalists Anonymous. Lots of interesting stuff in their archives, looks like a synth schematics gold mine! Looking through the various articles I keep coming across a schematic symbol that I don't recognise, it's this little chap:

The operational amplifier (Op-Amp) seems to play a key role in most parts of an analog synth, especially the VCO and VCA modules. Looking for more information I found a few resources aimed at relative beginners. A bit of Googling around found me this page which shows a basic square wave oscillator using one op amp. the chip used in this example is a UA741, but any standard sort of op amp should work. I ordered a bunch of TL084 quad op amps for my toying around, as I'd seen these used in some of the more serious VCO circuits I'd looked though on Experimentalists Anonymous. I also found a bunch of UTC4558 op amps in a karaoke machine which I took apart, which seem to do the job just fine as well!