THE PROMISES

INSTANT CLASSIC CONSOLE SOUND

The reason why Universal Audio have become (and have remained) such a successful company is that they have managed to take all the best parts of classic studio recording gear and made them available to the modern DAW user. The company’s plugins are genuinely second to none in terms of their exacting modelling of original hardware. I am lucky enough to have interviewed some of the biggest producers out there and when it comes to the question ‘what is your favourite plugin?, the answer, when it comes to classic outboard, is universally Universal. The big promise with LUNA, then, is an ‘Instant Classic Console Sound’, which you would expect as a given, considering what I have just said. However, whether you will get this when you download LUNA is slightly dependent on which plugins you already own from UA (and from third party companies who you might own Audio Units from), as the promised Neve Summing is a £229 purchase away.

This is a bit more like it. LUNA feels very ‘UA’ from the off, and anyone familiar with the Console software used with the company’s interfaces will be at home, as this is largely a (huge) expansion of that. It’s slick, focussed and aimed at bringing the UA world into a DAW with a great, modern workflow, but one that allows you to access and employ that vintage world of gear. You won’t be surprised to hear, then, that one of the first things you realise when moving around LUNA is that integration with UA plugins is tight; in fact it’s a way of life. UA describe the Oxide tape emulation and Neve summing and Studer tape options as ‘woven in’ to the LUNA workflow (once you’ve bought the latter two, that is). You can see why as they become part of the Mixer workflow like they were programmed in from the off, so in that sense the Neve especially is an almost must-buy. The rest of the DAW’s workflow is natural, well designed and you feel it has the maturity of a DAW that has been around for years, which is high praise indeed.