Diego Capoccitti OktaDie is a new 8-voice drone Synthesizer for macOS, Windows, and iOS, heavily inspired by the SOMA Lyra-8.
The SOMA Lyra-8 is a fascinating drone Synthesizer that remains a big success to this day. The Lyra-8 is no longer an insider synth for experimental sounds; it’s already mainstream among electronic music producers.
This success goes so far that in 2020, German developer Neutral Labs created a tribute instrument to it called Elmyra as a DIY project. For those who don’t have a budget for a Lyra-8, there is now an unofficial, affordable emulation of this drone synth.
Diego Capoccitti OktaDie
OktaDie by Diego Capoccitti is a new unofficial emulation of the Soma Lyra-8 drone Synthesizer for macOS, Windows and iOS.
The developer describes it as an inspired synth, but the interface and the concept of the engine are extremely close to the Lyra-8 hardware, making it more accurate to call it an emulation.
Like the original hardware, it features eight non-linear generators that have more the characteristic of a vintage electric organ than a classic VCO. They work in four pairs and two groups; each pair offers its own modulation source.
Two touch plates per voice let you play the generators expressively. Each voice has a dedicated tune control with a huge untempered range and either a mod or shape control.
The latter morphs the waveform from triangle to square, while the mod (envelope) shapes the pitch and waveform as it moves instead of merely opening a VCA after it. There is also an option to switch a pair of generators either to low or fast range.
Thanks to independent drift, two instances never sit perfectly in tune and give you that evolving nature of a Lyra-8-style drone synth.
More complex sounds are possible with the cross-modulation matrix in the middle over four pairs and two groups. With one switch, you can create FM mayhem. It reroutes everything into a single closed FM loop across all eight voices.
You want more craziness? Then, switch the total feedback on, which feeds the post-distortion output back into the matrix, flipping the entire instrument into an FM synth.
More Modulation & Sound Shaping
In the upper section, you have a hyper LFO that combines two LFOs with an AND/OR logic formula and cross-modulation. You can route it to the voice pairs (LFO FB CV…) as well as the delay.
Yes, there are also characterful effects. The first is a Lo-Fi noisy delay with dual modulation and cross-feedback that gives you everything from tradition to self-oscillating noisescapes. From here, it goes into a drive stage with a parallel mix.
Diego Capoccitti ships OktaDie with 61 factory presets that are available in a preset browser. Presets can be exchanged with all the versions, including iOS.
Nice: a purchase of OktaDie includes two plugins: the drone synth instrument as well as an FX processor that runs external audio through the delay, drive, and feedback loop.
The synth is playable with the on-screen pads or over MIDI: notes, velocity, aftertouch, pitch bend, CC1 vibrato depth, and MPE support.
First Impression
Emulating the Lyra-8 is not easy. It has a very distinctive organic raw sound that is difficult to imitate, even with other hardware.
OktaDie is a nice drone Synthesizer that gives you the workflow of the Soma Lyra-8. Sonically, I find the Lyra-8 far richer and denser than the plugin. However, it’s great that someone is offering it as a virtual instrument. It makes a lot of sense on an iPad as it has a touch interface.
Diego Capoccitti OktaDie is available now for $9,99. It runs as a VST3, AU, and AAX plugin on macOS (native Apple Silicon + Intel) and Windows. The iOS version with macOS and AUv3 support is out now for $4,99 on the Apple App Store.
More information here: Diego Capoccitti / App Store
On the app store the dev states it was ‘inspired by the Lyra’ inspired would be more in the camp of Mononoke which is still it’s own thing, this is really just the Lyra in ios form. That’s how it is, but then why not just say ‘hey I totally nabbed this from Soma’
This is a piece of art! I will certainly not sell my Lyra, but I wanted to have better control via midi cc and here we have that! Overall a very nice tamed version of the Lyra, however the GUI copycatting is questionable, on touch screens a different set of GUI controls would work much better, but that is not a deal breaker. Thanks to the midi implementation with other tools we can build our own GUI.