This week we welcome back Kirk Degiorgio for a detailed mixing course using the much talked about new DAW from Universal Audio - Luna.
Using Kirk’s soon-to-be-released remix of ‘Room Without a View’ by Steven Rutter & Bryoni from their album ‘Starcrossed’, this is a fascinating insight into how Kirk carries out his mixdown process. Starting with the export and import from one DAW to another to separate the production side of track creation and begin with fresh ears, we set up the mix before going through each element and bus group to fine-tune and get the track ready to be sent off for mastering.
With a quick and straightforward GUI and workflow options, Luna is paving the way in which producers are tackling the mixdown process.
Check it out and see why Luna has become a hot topic in the world of mixing!
ok, I get it now - so this is like exporting your stems to mix in Harrison Mixbus. Gotcha. But it’s in the UAD ecosystem, with their old chipset, overpriced plugins… *ok ok I’m just being snarky
Thanks for the course. I enjoyed seeing your workflow here. Learned more than a couple new things.
I’ve been experimenting with a similar workflow. Doubt I will ever do any songwriting in Luna, but I didn’t hate using it to mix and master from stems. But if you thought version 1.1.2 was funny, version 1.1.3 regularly freezes/crashes my whole computer.
I took a track I finished last year, coincidentally written while following along with your IDM course, and imported the stems into Luna. The stems had been normalized, so I had to use the track gain quite heavily to avoid overdriving the Studer tape emulation. You are definitely right about not wanting to normalize the stems in this new workflow. Am not used to pre-fader metering, either. The results sounded better. It’s subtle, but I set up a blind comparison test and picked the Luna mix over two previous versions of the mix.
Just got an Apollo interface and LUNA so this tutorial came at just the right time. I am so excited to use LUNA for my next mix! Love your tip on ‘turning off the monitor.’ Great job!
Luna is definitely still young but let’s be honest, it sounds really good and even if I can agree that UA ecosystem is not cheap at all, I do think that Luna is one of the best mixing/mastering solution on the market right now. We also got many updates since it’s launch and it should just improve in time I believe. The sound quality, GUI layout & design as well as very intuitive workflow is very much welcome for me, if you’re using a compatible UA audio interface and MacOS, Luna is something to try & investigate more for sure.
Great workflow & detailed explanations about the mixing process here, must watched tutorial IMHO, even if using another DAW for final mixing.
Such a great course, thank you! I was struggling by trying to mix in Luna the same way as Logic and Protools but this course has taught me to use Neve summing and tape to mix the tracks in a different way. Since this course, UAD have released the API Vision extension and it would be great if we could have a new module in this course to go over the API Vision and how to incorporate it into our mixes - thanks!
Couple of questions Kirk,
Is there a way to monitor peak values for tracks using the DAW or do you need to use third party plugins such as VUMT?
On the master, what’s the best way to do peak limiting when you are pushing loudness for a playable version of a track? Is this another one for third party plugins - Ozone for example?
I see that sidechaining has been adressed in more recent releases.
3 years on and Luna is now free, standalone no UAD interface required! Kirk, what’s the thinking about adding sparkle/saturation, the Pultec push/pull trick and gentle compression to the main output? I was always under the impression that the master should be as clean as possible, the mastering engineer will take care of adding these types of things during the mastering process?
