Diego Capoccitti released OktaDie this week — an 8-voice drone synthesizer plugin for macOS, Windows, and iOS, heavily inspired by SOMA Laboratory’s Lyra-8 hardware, and priced at just $9.99.
An instrument built around touch, not notation
OktaDie’s design deliberately discards the conventions most synths assume: no keyboard, no scale, no quantization anywhere in the signal path. Instead, it offers eight non-linear generators, organized into four pairs and two groups, each controlled through two touch plates per voice that let a player shape the sound expressively through direct, continuous touch rather than discrete note triggers. That structure is a direct inheritance from the Lyra-8’s own hardware design — an instrument built around the idea that a “drone synth” should be played more like a physical, resonant object than a conventional keyboard instrument.
What makes eight generators into an instrument, not just noise
The generators aren’t independent — a cross-modulation matrix lets the eight voices influence each other, which is where most of a drone synth’s actual musical interest comes from: overtones, beating patterns, and harmonic interactions that emerge from the generators’ relationships rather than from any single voice played alone. A dual modulated delay and built-in overdrive round out the signal path, giving the raw generator output somewhere to go without needing an external effects chain.
Software, but faithful to a specific hardware lineage
Capoccitti has a track record of building close emulations of specific hardware instruments — prior releases have covered gear like the Swarmatron, JEN SX-1000, Strega, and Grendel Drone Commander — rather than generic “inspired by” synth designs. OktaDie continues that pattern: it’s positioned specifically as a Lyra-8-style experience, not a loosely-related drone synth borrowing the concept. For anyone drawn to the original SOMA hardware’s specific way of making sound but priced out of (or simply without space for) the physical unit, a faithful $9.99 software version — running as VST3/AU/AAX on desktop and AUv3 on iPad, usable both as an instrument and an effect — is a genuinely different proposition than the broader field of generic ambient/drone plugin tools.
Related Reading
- Diego Capoccitti OktaDie brings a Lyra-8-like drone synth experience to your mac, win, and iOS — Synth Anatomy
- OktaDie - Lyra-8-style drone synth and FX for mac, windows, and iOS — KVR Audio forum
- LYRA-8, Swarmatron, JEN SX-1000, Strega, and Grendel Drone Commander Emulators by Diego Capoccitti — MATRIXSYNTH
- SOMA Laboratory Lyra-8 Drone Synthesizer — Perfect Circuit