Next week, I am have a week house and cat sitting for a friend in the English Riviera (it is like the French Riviera but being England, normally with more wind and rain). It is in a flat overlooking the sea.
So I have been very naughty, and ignoring the cries of the very recent baby (Opsix), I have bought a white Lyra. And some extra pedals to help it sound good/better (a nice reverb UA Evermore and a compressor Electro-Harmonix Platform-both relatively cheap for what they are).
20 minutes in, 2 things.
It is a different universe.
It just sounds different to the Newtonian/Einstein one, I normally live in.
And despite finding my self in a demented Zoo loop, where they seem to be torturing Giraffes while the Hippos sing-I have a huge grin on my face.
I took my new Lyra out to the garden. And unlike my 404, which turns out to be unusable in sunlight, it works. Having no screens and only 2 non-essential to be seen lights (which you can see)- means it can be used anywhere (unlike the essential invisible pads of the 404-last summers unsuccessful attempt at garden music).
It is lovely to play untethered in a Welsh valley.
Good news is that the Lyra can be powered off the same USB power brick that powers my 404 (which needs USB C). This was using the same 12 volt centre-positive Myvolts ripcord that powers most of my Elektron boxes. I was bit worried about this, as I have not seen this mentioned anywhere.
And as it uses USB A, it will hopefully work with any powerbrick-but I have yet to try this. It also seems to use very little power-my brick stayed at 99% with an hour/hour and half play(-hard to say how long it was in this reality). The digitone would have been dropping down towards 70-60% in the same time. Shows how much power a screen and lots of lights takes.
More worrying, was that I was transported/teleported/abducted by aliens from a gentle, sunny Welsh valley (with no eagles but we do get Red kites) to some sort of spaceship that might have been under attack. There was lots of noisy pulsating machines that throbbed and went into Alarm mode often. It did eventually settle down after the galactic war had been won and that is when the aliens tried to communicate with me. Their talk was soothing and almost musical-it must have imparted important knowledge to my subconscious. But unfortunately, I am unable to pass onto you their wisdom.
I used the settings from my initial play around which was about 10 minutes. I did not even try to tune or practice.
Set up a compressor and a reverb in Bitwig. Pressed play and some magic came out.
It is only the second track I have ever published anywhere.
I recently purchased out of curiosity a pair of adapters for modular systems (photo below). They are supposed to be able to securely attach to the Lyra-8 sensors by strong magnets. Unfortunately, the Lyra-4 sensors are made of a non-magnetic metal, perhaps zinc or aluminum, as is the body, which is surprisingly very light.
Are Lyra-8’s sensors really made of magnetic metal ? Can anyone verify this ?
For the modular adapters, I will probably 3D print some kind of ring to keep the modules in place.
Interesting, I recently read a review on a German site that said the Lyra-4 sensors were more sensitive than the Lyra-8, maybe that was one reason for the change, they added a more conductive and probably cheaper metal, my guess is zinc.
Just bought the Lyra-4, as I was thinking it might be a bit more ‘controllable’ and easier to tame, but somehow I don’t feel I made the right decision. The Lyra-8 is definitely more that 2x Lyra-4 and not only because of the cross modulation and FX, the 8 had for sure a lot of extra edge and feel to me.
I’ve been trying some things with Lyra-8 running into Analog Keys using the input osc type and with CV from the AK. It’s important to know if you are using CV Voices input on the Lyra that it isn’t V/octave or V/hz or any kind of standard relationship between the control voltage and pitch. You can sequence things but it’s never going to give you the most stable pitch, it takes a lot of trial and error to get something that doesn’t sound atonal (unless there’s a trick I don’t know).
Otherwise the Lyra’s a blast through that extra overdrive and two filters.
Yeah, thats what i was thinking - i could just run it into my Bluebox and record it separately, but i have LFOs and envelopes that can affect the filters, overdrive and FX, so why not add some tempo-sync that way?
I’m not planning on trying to control the pitch, i know thats not the spirit of a Lyra
