New FREE Windows DAW: LUNA by Universal Audio

this is Luna a new free door for Windows hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you will universal audio actually released the free Luna door a few years ago however I've ignored it up until now because initially you had to use their Hardware with it and it was Mac only but that all changed just two days ago when they announced a Windows version and by the way you don't have to use it with their Hardware anymore so I gave myself just 4 hours last night to use it for the first time to record a quick song I wanted to find out how intuitive it was and whether it met my needs let's take a look and see how I got on this video is sponsored by drok Kid follow the VIP Link in the description down below to get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music to the world so one of the first things I did with Luna was load up the de Mo project that comes with it and that's what you can see here I'm not going to play any sound from it because there may be copyright issues but that's okay we're just going to have a visual look at it at the moment and what you're looking at is one of the two main views this is the mixer view you can switch to the other view which is the timeline view just at the top here in the view menu so I'll click on that and this is our main timeline view and this is where you would do your main recording and editing EX Etc now with both of these views if we go up to the view menu we can click on this icon here and we can switch certain elements off and on so I could switch on the tracks panel on the left hand side there switch off again I could switch off the focus info and monitor and just keep it nice and clean and simple if I wanted to that is also true of the mix of view and it's the mix of view that I want to take a closer look at now in the lower part of our mixer view we can see things like our faders and our pan controls and our solo and mute buttons Etc I'm not going to focus on this part because it's very very similar to other doors we'll take a look at a couple of things later but mostly I want to focus on the top part of this View and if I scroll up and down you can see there's a few elements that we can't initially see now if we look over on the left hand side we can see a list of those different elements and we can sort of switch them off and on or we can turn their views off and on here and that doesn't mean they're not working anymore it just means we can't see them so let's switch each of them on one at a time and look at what they actually do so if we switch on inserts for example you can see this is like a regular mix view in other doors we can select a plugin from here so when I click on the plus button it opens up this panel on the left we get a list in alphabetical order of makers of plugins interestingly though universal audio still appears at the top there H strange but let's go go down to the Fab filter folder and I'll just click on Pro Q3 very standard EQ plugin to put in there and you can see it's appeared there and we can do things like move it around to different positions Etc if we want to change the order with other plugins so that's all pretty straightforward and you've seen all of that in other doors let's have a look at another section we tend to see in other doors and that is the send section I'll switch that On and Here of course if we click on a plus button then the panel opens up on the left hand side and we can select the destination for the S this project's already got some buses so I can select a bus here we can also directly select outputs of our audio interface here which I find is actually quite useful especially if you want to send out to outboard gear Etc now as for the next section the output section again we see this as well in other doors um and this is just where we're going to send this particular track it could be to a bus or it could be to the main output you would select that there now let's go to the really interesting stuff so right at the top we have the input section I'll switch that on and you can see here that on a regular track I can just click on the plus button and I can select one of the inputs with my audio interface but some of these tracks are a bit different and you can see over here with this one we have a summing plugin in here now this is a bus and that's why we can add a summing plug-in now it's a little bit special however this is not just a regular plug-in this is a specific type of plugin that can only be used here and this is made by universal audio now let me make this quite clear with Luna you don't get all of the ones that you can see here in my project for free there's one that you get for free and we'll look at that in a moment but the others are paid for now look you may be thinking oh this is the catch to the free version Look you're not going to get the with any other door anyway so this is just something that you can buy as an add-on now moving on from here let's take a look at the utility section okay so I'll just expand that using the arrow here and you can see here there's just a few things that you can adjust here um like you can set the trim you can change the polarity for each Channel um of a stereo Channel or if it's mono just one you can set a delay time in milliseconds and you can set up your side chaining here so that's quite a handy little panel the next one let's get rid of some of these let's get rid of that get rid of that um is the tape panel this is a little bit similar to the input we saw on the buses there um but this time this is where we can insert a tape plug-in now most of the ones you can see here are the oxide plug-in you do get this with Luna for free okay and it's really quite nice if we click on this plug-in you'll see see is an expanded view of the plugin on the left hand side there okay the other ones that you can see here are demos of something that doesn't come for free um with Luna but like me you could try out the demo or you can not to use at all and that's absolutely fine there's some different choices that you can insert there but this is specifically for these tape plugins you can't um insert regular sort of VST plugins Etc here the next view down is the console View and yet again this is an area where we can insert these kind of plugins but they're kind of specific for the console View and these can really change the sound of your particular track and give it a lot of character now on the side here we can see that we can switch views here so it's on the Dynamics view at the moment we can switch to EQ uh view or the input view here okay and then we can change them individually at the top um like so as well if we want to choose a specific View for that channel and that is the main sections in the mix view there I really think it's very very good to be honest with you in the short period of time I've used it I found it very very intuitive nice and flexible and quite powerful now of course before I could get to all of this lovely eye candy and listen to any of it I had to do a basic setup of Luna and that can be quite painful sometimes with different doors so I wanted to talk you through what it was like for me let's go back to our main sort of Opening screen here this is where we start with Luna now the first time I started Luna it scanned all of the plugins on my system I've got around about 2,000 plugins so it can take a while with different doors and it wasn't too bad with Luna at all just took a few minutes it was trouble-free for me at least of course you could have some problems with plugins I guess but for me at least it went absolutely fine now the other thing I wanted to do was set up my Hardware so I could sort of hear things and do things so without reading the manual I clicked on settings over here and when I clicked on this I saw that there was a list of audio interfaces that I could choose from now you won't see a list like this most likely because I've got a whole bunch of audio interfaces because I'm a YouTuber and I review such things you may just see one here in which case you would select it now one important thing to note here is if we go up to this audio device menu up here we see our normal asio devices that's what we've got selected but we can also select Apollo and I think this is only going to appear if you have a universal audio Apollo interface of some kind which I do now if you select that you get some special features available to you within Luna which you don't normally see okay we'll talk about those a little bit later but I selected my audio interface and the next thing I wanted to do was set up my midi keyboards and things so I went over to the midi section over here I could see a list of my midi keyboards and things but to be honest with you I didn't actually have to select any of them for them to work I think this is something to do with just midi clock synchronization so you don't have to select anything here everything was just working to be honest with you now one thing I did want to set up was my Surface controllers I've got two uh one is my icon surface controller and also I have transport control on my arterior keyboard so I went over to controllers over here and I just found them on the list and I added both of the inputs and outputs for them I enabled them with the on button and they just worked perfectly right away to be honest I didn't have to set a mode I didn't have to choose Macky or anything like that I don't know whether it auto detects that or whether it only uses Macky I can't tell you about that but for me anyway this was wonderful CU in some other doors I've had to spend hours trying to get these things working these worked right away so everything was set up and ready to go so I was ready to create a new project so when you first open up a new project or a session as they call it in Luna they try and help you out a little bit by having this leftand panel open and this dialogue here for creating a new track so I'm just going to create an audio track uh the typ is selected there and let's call it um let's call it Mike my name I'm not going to select anything for tape or console let's just just keep it simple I selected okay when I did this in real life and it created a track like so the next thing I needed to do of course was select an input from my audio interface so I did that by clicking here for input clicking on there I can see my list of inputs side there this is currently connected up to my third input so I'll select that I can close that panel then you just need to record enable the track and for me maybe not for you but for me I can hear kind of an echo when I do that so I'm going to mute it so that I'm not hearing that latency and then I just need to hit record now normally before you do this of course you would set up your metronome you can do that at the top here set the beats per minute and switch the click on I've also got a one bar coun in selected here so you'd hit record and then start recording like so this is a recording okay it's be embarrassing okay so there I have my audio that's your basic recording of audio right so I'll just disable that for recording I'll unmute it so we'll be able to hear it in a moment lucky us and the other thing I wanted to do um when I was recording my track was add some virtual instruments so again up in the top left here just clicked plus this time I went to instrument shows this panel I'm just going to leave it being called instrument at the moment now the instrument that's got selected is called shape if I clicked on this I could choose any one of the other virtual instruments on my system however I'm going to stick with shape because this is a free instrument which actually comes with Luna so once I've selected that I'll click on okay now it does take a moment or two to load up so let's fill in time while it's doing that and it appears like so now actually for a free instrument this is not too bad I think it starts off by loading up a piano not too bad sorry sorry about my playing my keyboard is just slightly Out Of Reach at the moment um you can select other instruments here by the way let's go try out some of the drums I'll go to Drums uh oh Jazz kit let's try that out [Music] uh that's really not too bad I think we will go back to keys and that piano there so I'll select that I've got my piano sound and I'll just close that and the same again you would just arm it for for recording like so hit the record button this is a recording pretty terrible recording anyway you can see that that has appeared there we can see the midi notes there we'll be taking a look at all of that later but that was the basics of recording and it didn't take much for me to figure it out to be honest with you so once I recorded my audio and midi one of the first things I wanted to do was actually edit some of my audio and I found all this rather intuitive I didn't have to read the manual or anything so for example if I go to one of these clips here you can easily as you would expect grab the end like so you know and drag your beginning and end points um as you wish you can also do Fade inss like you can in other doors like so just by grabbing a little handle there and then adjusting the curve here for the fade in all of that was as expected and I was delighted to see that other things that you can actually do uh for example is Select an area like this and then just delete it like so uh as you would expect there if I wanted to drag this along here and put those two next to each other I found if I go to the middle here I can create a cross fade between the two all of that was rather straightforward I didn't do anything more advanced than that if I'm honest with you um I did things like you know selecting both of these clips I could do that for example and then if I right clicked I could found that I sorry select both of them right click I found I could consolidate them in other doors is kind of like called bouncing or something like that so I was able to do things like that and if you really want to sort of dive in and take a closer look at this one of the things you can do is select a clip and then press e on the keyboard I guess e is for expand that gives you an expanded view of that clip like so and if you really want to find out about all the editing functions go right to the top right hand side you can see a workflow area here and you've got some different sort of context buttons that you can put at the top of the screen depending on what you're doing so if you click on the third one there that's the edit um the edit workflow and you can see a whole bunch of buttons there which sort of indicate what you can do with editing it's fairly simple but in terms of a door I feel like it gets the job done most of the time now when it came to MIDI editing I spent ages looking for a piano roll view there isn't really a piano roll View in this application what you can do is click on a clip I'll select this piano clip down here and press e on the keyboard again for expand and it kind of expands that clip up to what you might call a piano roll View and when you want to go back to normal just click on E again and it goes back to normal but we'll click on the and expand it like so and see what we can do well as you would expect you can do things like drag notes around you can move their position like so you can change the length of the note all of those kinds of things you you that you would expect to do in a piano roll view of course you can delete them you can double click and add new notes in like I just did there goodness knows how that sounds now but anyway we'll keep that um the other thing that you can do is adjust things like velocity so to do that you need to go to the top and click on this little icon up here and that shows this uh little sort of panel down here it's currently showing velocity we can go in and adjust velocity and as you kind of would expect to do um with different doors and you know if you've made a selection like so for example um I'll just make a selection of all those notes you could hold control on the keyboard and sort of draw in different values so um all of that kind of stuff is very useful but we can go over to the left here click on velocity and change this to any other sort of ccs and things I'll change it to say pitch band here and then um in that section below the the piano roll we can then go in you know make changes to our pitch Bend curve there um just as I say as you would in other doors in that way uh another thing which is actually quite nice about this I must say and I'll just go up and close that section off is the quantise feature so if we click on the little Q button at the top of our clip um and it opens up the quantise panel on the left hand side and what I like about this is It's non-destructive So if I select a bunch of notes here that I want to quantize you can see I can select different values for quantizing uh with the grid section up here and they'll all move around yeah but if I switch it off they just go back to where they were initially so it's storing our initial sort of playing positions if you like uh but it's not applying the quantization permanently if that makes sense I quite like that as a little feature actually now another thing which I haven't seen with other doors which I think is quite handy is when you've got a a bit of playing with this piano for example that we have here there can be quite big gaps in between the higher notes and the lower notes yeah you can see that in the first bar here what you can do is click on this fold button up here and it gets rid of all the notes we're not playing yeah and that just makes it a little bit easier for example if you just want to be sort of lining up notes and things and you you don't want to have to scroll up and down okay so quite a neat little feature there uh that fold feature and basically that's all there is well there's a few more things uh to editing Medi but that's the basic functionality in my personal opinion it's a little bit too basic for some people I think if you were writing sort of like film scores and things like this this would be way too basic for the song that I recorded for some basic playing and basic editing it was fine okay but I don't think that midi editing at this stage is lunar strength now one thing I deal with a lot in my Productions is routing now from the tracks view here we saw that we can click on the plus button up here and add audio and instrument tracks but we can also add buses from here so I could click on bus and then just G me this gives me this panel to create a new bus with the options there the other place that I do it actually more often than not is from the mix of view so if I go to the mix of view I'll often be doing something like sending say all of the vocals in this track out to a bus so what I'm going to do is Select uh the first of the vocals here hold shift and select the last of them so all three of these tracks are selected then I'm going to go to the send section click on plus and you can see in the left hand panel where I've got the sort of destinations for my sends if I want to create a new bus I can click on the plus button here to create a bus I'll leave all the default values there and click on okay the new bus has been created next to those three tracks you can see it just here so that's all done very easy and if I wanted to do that not so much as a send but as an output I could do the same from the output section here once I've got that bus created I can grab its name at the bottom here and then just drag it around to where I want I like to have my buses grouped together at the end like so so I could do that the buses created so routing is pretty simple in that way so I just wanted to quickly confirm what you get for free with this free door okay the first thing is oxide that we looked at earlier so this is a tape saturation plugin that goes in the tape section of your console here you can see I've inserted it on most of the tracks of my uh demo that I've made um and if we click on this we can expand it to the side here and you can kind of see in action there working so that is for free um but you can get other uh tape saturators as well you have to pay for for those the other thing which is free that we mentioned earlier and I just want to confirm this is that if um it's something called shape okay I'll just open that up I used it for uh piano and for percussion on my track um I'm really impressed with it actually is a free virtual instrument the sounds that come with it uh decent quality and there's a good range of really useful ones in there and finally the thing that I haven't actually shown you because I haven't really tried it is an arpeggiator midi effect so I'll just bring this up here um it looks like it's got loads of features I literally have not played with it at all I've seen a couple of other people use it and it looks pretty impressive if that's your thing you'll be glad to see that is there so that's the free stuff which comes with the free door so I've switched over to my Apollo interface for a moment so I can show you some of the advantages I found with that in case you happen to own one so one of the main advantages I found was in the input section so if I expand the input section and then uh enable one of these tracks for recording you can see a whole bunch of controls appear here relating to my preamp on my audio interface so I don't have to leave my door now to adjust that so I could for example adjust the preamp gain there without having to leave the door I could switch over to a mic input turn on phantom power all of the other good stuff that you would normally do there I can also insert Unison plugins here here so I could click here uh select senty tube channel strip and that has inserted that for use in there also below I can insert recorded effects now I haven't fully researched this yet but from what I gather anything that you select in the Unison section will be printed to the track anything in the record effects can uh be swapped out later can be adjusted after the recording process don't quote me on that but I believe that's how that's working that's a really huge Advantage overall if you're an Apollo user because it means you don't have to leave the software to go out and do that the other thing I noticed was uh things had changed a little bit down at the bottom here this new button appeared here the little yellow one and I noticed with my buses that I can select some auxiliary channels here for effects processing in real time um on my buses so that's another really handy feature and it all helps in the battle against latency I guess so that's the advantages that I found with using my Apollo interface so in a moment I'm going to talk about the pros and the cons that I found in my first few hours of using this door I'm also going to play that demo track which I recorded last night but before I do I'd like to remind you that if you follow that VIP Link in the description down below to our sponsor drr kid you'll get 7% off of your first year of membership so let's talk about the pros so in terms terms of Pros there were a few things that struck me in the few hours I gave myself to record a quick demo here I'm just going to go through them quickly first of all the overall look of this mixer especially I really like it now to some of you that may not matter at all you're just into you know the functionality of it and that's absolutely fine if that's you but for me I feel more encouraged to use something if it just sort of looks nice if it's a aesthetically pleasing and I do find this very aesthetically pleasing call me old fashion don't mind all the old drop shadows and the slightly 3d effect so I think it looks nice and it doesn't surprise me universal audio overall tend to like this kind of look to things there's a universality universality is that word um to their design so that I like let me know in the comments what you think about that now a very small feature which I found which I just thought was very very cool was something called bill I don't think I've really seen this implemented in this way in other doors let's look down at the bottom at these drum tracks they're all in red here now the first five there are individual tracks but they're all summing into this bus here okay which is called drums and percussion and because it's a bus you'll notice it's got this spill button now when we click this a really nice thing happens I'll click it now everything else disappears apart from the tracks which feed into to this drum track and where it goes out to I guess with the main output here this is really handy if you just want to focus on a particular section of your mix here and just press spill again and we see all of our other tracks let's try it again further along I can see there's a whole bunch of vocals here which go into this vocal bus again I'll click spill and bang all I can see now is my vocals I can work on those all the things feeding into that bus really nicely implemented I just like the way that that's done I can definitely see myself using that the next thing I noticed was the default for the panning on the channels if you notice with the stereo tracks we've got two panning controls in most other doors you'll see one panning control you pan it left and right now think about this stereo tracks are really two mono tracks aren't they a left and a right and we don't don't normally get control over where each of those goes normally they just pan hard hard left and hard right but we can get individual control of those two channels in this door with this default panning option so I could take the Left Channel and pan it more right or or what have you you know you could make your stereo track more or less mono than it is okay if you don't want that just right click there go to simple and you'll go to your normal panning control but I actually quite like that one actually the next one or the final one that I want to mention which just stood out to me I mean there's a whole bunch of things which are quite nice but this stood out to me and that was the saving of versions the only thing I've got to complain about this is the terminology but I'll show you so let's say you've got different versions of your track what you can do is go up to file then go down to save bookmark okay so I'm going to click on save bookmark and I'll give it a meaningful name like uh for didn't spell that right did I for video okay so this is kind of a version of my mix or my session I should say I'll click on Save and that's done okay now what if I want to go to a different version of this well what you do is you go up to file again and you go to open version this is my complaint um why not keep the same terminology save version or open bookmark or what have you that's a little bit confusing to someone who doesn't want to read the manual we'll click on open version and you can see all of the different versions in there um the bookmarked ones are shown in blue there but all the different versions of um my session there so if I want to go to a previous version I can quite easily do that just by clicking on one of these and clicking on open I like that I I know you can do a similar thing in different ways in all other doors virtually but that makes kind of sense to me I could see myself using that so I've already mentioned one of the main cons and that is the lack of a piano roll view I know we can expand it as I did earlier but this interface is it's just okay it's a little little bit clunky to me I'd rather see a dedicated piano roll view I got by with this demo but I could see myself getting frustrated at times so that's my first uh con if you like I hope they can improve that I think a lot more people would come to this door if they did the next thing that was a little bit disappointing was the fact that when I was recording last night I had a bit of a cold coming on my voice was in very poor shape and I was quite pitchy so I wanted to use melodine and I quickly found out that uh Luna doesn't currently have ARA support or a support which is the way I normally like to use melodine which works at a clip level okay so instead I had to use it as a plug-in so let me show you that in action I'll open up where are we uh melodine here here's the plugin um of uh looking at my performance and what I quickly found was I couldn't find any way to resize this window look I'm just at the edges here wanting to resize this window seems as I can't resize it and I guess what they're doing is opening um plugins up to their default size and you know hoping that the plug-in manufacturer will have a resize option melodine doesn't as far as I know I could be wrong but I couldn't resize this anyway and it made an absolute nightmare to work in this small view with melodine I sort of gave up a little bit after a while just did the best I could so um there's a couple of things there AR support and resizable plug-in Windows would be handy the next thing I found and I know a lot of people have actually talked about this because I've subsequently researched it was there's no multiple outputs for virtual instruments so if I were to go to this one didn't actually use this in the project but just inserted it here um this is a favorite of mine Addictive Drums and often what I would like to do is go to The Addictive Drums mixer and output these drums all to separate outputs which I can access in my door um that functionality isn't available in Lun at the moment I think they're working on it they've heard the community and they know um that it want that people want it to be added but it's not there at the moment a slight not quite a deal breaker but very very disappointing for me in in those terms um now the other thing I can't actually demonstrate to you but one plug-in I use quite a lot is contact I currently use contact 7 and whenever I inserted it it just crashed if you're a contact user you might want to let me know in the comments down below if that happens for you as well I don't know if it's a known issue or not but um that would be another thing that at the moment would stop me from using this as a door for any Productions at all so if there is an issue I hope that they uh resolve that soon so overall I feel like there are too many cons or significant cons at the moment for me to switch over to this door but I tell you what I'm gunning for it I want this door to be successful I want them to make those improvements because I think that it really has potential to be one of the major doors out there let me know what you think in the comments down below are you going to download this and try it out I think you should at least give it a try in my opinion now I'm going to play you that demo that I recorded last night I want to say up front look I recorded it really really quickly the performance isn't all that great maybe some the recording as well but anyway this is what I did in a really short period of [Music] time I roll a song about the way you are ready woman see you haven't changed you lost our love long ago woman you seem so [Music] strange sung glasses hide your eyes from the people passing by ready War even though it's rain and you had behind your kyss a r woman had years of [Music] Fain Bo you trying to ignore me as I'm passing you by dark glasses never hide that evil look in your ey ready [Music] woman ready War ready it [Music] War Ready it warm [Music]

Channel: Creative Sauce

Views: 157,640

Keywords: Home Studio, Home Recording, Recording, Music Production, How To, universal audio, ua luna, luna, luna for windows, best free DAW, best free daw 2024

Id: wAyz3mVkfnM

Length: 33min 48sec (2028 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2024