I’ve got my tentacles around something good and I don’t want to let go. I can feel good about grocery stores again but I’m not sure I want to. Coming out of the cave, parched, there’s fear and a knee-jerk retreat to minuscule comforts. There’s heat from friction with an excitement for expression, boundaries, showing up as my full self regardless of what strings may need to be cut. Good riddance, hello!

This synth has 8 voices, individually tunable, though not so easily because they have a huge range. It has lots of feedback loops, cross-modulation, no presets, and lots of non-linearity. It can sound melodic and ethereal or dirty and glitchy and everywhere in between.

There are a lot of things I got wrong, obviously, including making the case too small at first. I just read the tape measure wrong. There are so many intimacies around making something like this for me that it’s hard to talk about almost. I feel like I’m showing off with a cheap 2-D explanation of some stranger's trip abroad. Come hang out in my room and we can play it if you want. AMA. I’m all ears (no arms).

In any case it’s an attempt at control, and the result is this complex 8-legged monster whose grip on predictability is just light enough. I welcome its influence.

     

The spiders are going crazy on the jobsite these days, a huge reno in the middle of framing. There are eggs in the lumber pile and I crushed one between some sheathing accidently. Birds have moved in and all our attempts to peek at them and their cute eggs are met by all the sharpness of a freaked out fleeing mom.

It's a modified Lyra-8 in case you're wondering. Everything I learned about this before the build was from the soma documentation or this modwiggler forum. I posted more technical details over there if you're interested. And here is me playing it.