SWITCHING TO LUNA... WAIT, WHAT? PART 1 OF 3

Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, I had a front row seat to the advent of the personal computer, video games, phones with cords and all sorts of things people under 30 take for granted.  As such, I was a die hard PC user (as opposed to Apple).  I always said, “yeah, well, that’s cool, but on my PC I can configure everything and have control over all the stuff and because I know some basic code” (from the pre-windows days), I felt like there wasn’t anything I couldn’t fix, or pirate, for my PC.  The PC felt like an open book, a DIY kit for enterprising people that knew what they wanted from their system.  Later, I had been working in the music industry for some years and things had begun to change.  Sometime around 2003, I bought my first macbook pro.  As a result, I can proudly say, and with a measure of bravado, that I haven’t used a mouse as a main control tool for 20 years.  I haven’t looked back and everytime I had to use my wife’s window’s laptop for some mundane task I feel like I’ve been made to put on a scratchy wool sweater from the 1800’s over naked skin.  As unrefined tool as there ever was.  They’ve gotten so much better with their hardware, and yes, a fully loaded PC made for gaming will smoke even the best Mac every time, but… I don’t play games.  And… luckily for me, I have no need of Microsoft outlook or power point either… and if I did, Apple has some pretty good replacements for those as well.  So what?   So, I’ve used a lot of expensive software over the years for our different businesses, my music career and for the last five years for my voice over business.  However, most of these fine etheric products were acquired through moneyless transactions on thepiratebay.org, mac-torrent or some other questionable process, except one.  Logic Pro X.  I <3 Logic, I have made it mine.  So much so, that I paid for it with actual money.  For VO, we use a single track, mostly export to mono and don’t need a lot of things that it was built for, but I love the way it feels, I love the customizable nature of it, I love that I can put my logo in the track info, i love that I can change the color of anything, but most of all, I spent months creating an editing flow that allowed me to record over 13K words a day and spend very little time editing (no, I don’t do punch and roll).  A few years ago I got an Apollo Twin X Duo / quad (pardon if I didn’t get that all right, they need to work on their model names).  In effect, what the Apollo does is take over the processing of plug-ins so that your GPU doesn’t have to deal with it because it has it’s own.  Also, they’ve taken great pains to replicate every circuit, behavior and flaw of some of the world’s most desirable and esoteric audio hardware in existence.  At the time I bought it, I was using a crispy and very transparent Audient iD4 and was never very happy with it.  I had to use the built in EQ from logic and some plug-ins I don’t remember to make my sound good.  No, I wasn’t using a crazy expensive mic either, I was (and still do when I travel) using my beloved Aston Origin.  That thing took me about 6 months to really learn how to use because I was a new VO, but now, I’ll never part with it.  It is a work horse and I’ve gotten many compliments from studios from NY to Tbilisi.  Turns out, that mic paired with the Avalon 767sp in unison mode on the Apollo is about one of the best sounds there is… on my voice.  At home, in my booth, I have a U67 clone built 30 years ago by the founder of Advanced Audio in Canada.  (great stuff if you aren’t hip).  It has a giant tube in it, takes up a lot of real estate in my booth and I feel super professional using it (after it warms up for 20-25 minutes).  It really is a top end luxury mic and my higher end studios notice, but for 90% of my income, no one knows the difference, except me, because, c’mon, that’s F’ing cool.  Just look at it!

 
 I digress. Turns out the Avalon 767 doesn’t really do it justice.  Neither do the UA pre’s or even the venerable Neve plugins… but, the API vision channel, holy shit.  My big mic, and that preamp are made for each other and they will never part.  Wow, I’ve gotten away from the message.  Ok, so, Logic.   I spend about 6-8 hours a day staring at Logic X pro… until last Friday.  A friend mentioned I should check out Luna from UA.  I did originally because it came out like literally the week I bought my interface, and it was free, but honestly it should have really still been in beta at that point and was frustratingly difficult to use.  But I figured, they’d probably worked on it a bunch since then and here I am.  Two days using it and looking forward to tomorrow.  And… it’s free. As a VO guy, as soon as you open the default session/template/or whatever, you realize that there’s a ton of shit you neither care about or would ever use.  However with very little poking around (like at the very clever three little dots at the top left of the tracks screen)

 you find that yes, you can change all sorts of stuff and get down to what matters.  Time, Names and gain.

 
Also, you’ll find very quickly you can also turn of the snap functions because that is useless for VO in nearly every application.  So there’s that.  You see, UA interfaces work with something called a “console” that has all your input setting. and hard recorded plugins that would be used before recording to your DAW, however with every DAW other than Luna, you have to use them separately and sometimes that experience is not great.  But, in Luna, the console is actually part of the channel,   I can change settings on my interface from the channel menu on my track.  I’m sure I’m not using the right nomenclature here, but the deal is that when I’m doing my normal day’s work of Chinese terrible grammar repetitive, but life sustaining scripts and I get a job from a part time studio in Abu Dhabi for a high energy resort or casino, I can change my settings on my preamp and anything else that I record live with without actually leaving Luna’s interface.  That’s pretty strong.  Before, I’d have to go to the console, load a saved preset for that particular client and then check and recheck just to be safe.   And… fear not, if you don’t have a UA interface, it plays well with any interface, but you’d have to use it just like any other DAW, you won’t be able to tweak stuff on your interface from inside Luna… as far as I can tell. So far so good.  Now, after I’ve made 10-12K words of near gibberish from my eastern asian counterparts sound reasonable, there will be some inevitable editing.  I have to say that on day one I was really frustrated with Luna’s out of the box editing.  I use an external piece of kit to help me edit (mainly so I don’t wear out certain keys on my macbook),

but also because I can program macros and key sequences like “cmd+z” or “opt+x” or whatever with one key that is right under my fat fingers in my left hand. My right hand is the scroll/timeline jockey. I figured out a couple things and was still pretty underwhelmed. AND, the big one for me is that there is no control over the color of the waveform. Having a black waveform for editing for a guy that has been using Logic everyday for the last three years is like nails on a chalkboard. Suffice to say, at the end of day one, I was not convinced. Then… I remembered that it took me months to dial in Logic...and tomorrow, is another day.