Making Music #1: Choosing A DAW

Making Music is where I share the process as I write, arrange, record and release my music. You’ll get to read it all: what went well, what really didn’t, the decisions I had to make along the way, and why I made them. I hope you find it useful!

I’m finally sitting down to record my music. The starting point? Deciding whether I’m going to use Reaper, Universal Audio’s LUNA – or a mixture of both.

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First Impressions: Native Instruments Maschine Mikro MK3 Finger Drumming Pad

AKA how to get the Native Instruments Maschine Mikro MK3 to play nice with Universal Audio’s LUNA DAW.

I recently bought a Maschine Mikro MK3, to use for percussion / finger drumming. Have I finally found something that suits me, or will the search be continuing? Read on for my First Impressions.

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Studio Diary #25: The Roland SPD-SX and Universal Audio Luna

MIDI drums and drum samples. Love ’em or hate ’em, they’re a fact of life for just about everyone who records music at home. And, just as most of us can’t accommodate the noise of a real drum kit in the house, most of us have nowhere to keep a digital drum kit either. We’re left with using much smaller percussion pads, or we compromise and use something we can sort-of play like Roland’s SPD-SX.

But how do you get them into Universal Audio’s LUNA DAW in the first place? When I googled, I couldn’t find any instructions anywhere on how to do this.

So I wrote my own.

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First Impressions: Universal Audio’s LUNA DAW

The thing I hate most about digital recording? Latency. Even though I’m about as far away from a technically-accomplished player as you can get, I really struggle with coping with latency when I’m recording with Reaper. It’s the main reason that I bought my first UAD Apollo interface back in 2016.

So when Universal Audio announced LUNA, and made a huge song-and-dance about how it enables recording with virtually zero latency, I had to try it.

That was at the end of April 2020. I’ve been using it on-and-off throughout May, and scribbling down notes as I went along.

When you read this, please remember that it’s perfectly possible that some of these points may have been addressed in more recent releases of LUNA. UAD seem to be doing a great job of getting regular updates out for users.

That kinda hints that I ran into a lot of pain points with LUNA …

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