An evening with Lyra

Today is our last day of isolation, which will officially end at midnight. Then Abi is back at school tomorrow and Dan is back on rota at the pub. I hope you can understand, then, that for the sake of a few hours, I decided to let them go out with their friends to watch the football final. (I mean, it wasn't like they'd be snogging any ministerial aides or anything.)

This left me with the evening to myself and no impetus to watch England playing Italy, so I booted up the Lyra 8, and settled down with the manual. One of the joys of the Lyra is that you can get some quite extraordinary sounds out of it almost immediately, but also without knowing quite how!

So, I started at the bottom with the row of contacts. You need to touch the lower one and then complete the circuit by touching the upper one. Just how you touch it has an impact on the sound and that responsiveness is in turn affected by the switch above.

After that, you get to the individual tunings for each oscillator, so I connected Lyra up to an equaliser to help me see what I was doing, and set up a group of harmonically related notes.

And so on.

I didn't come close to getting through the manual but I did have a very enjoyable evening and I feel more confident that (eventually) I'm going to get the hang of this thing :-)