SCOPERISE:   Where's your technological status at ?

DANTE: See gear pictorial to the right.  This is my current setup.  I use all virtual instruments these days and mix in-the-box.  Currently I use Reason for recording and tracking and Harrison Mixbus for mixdown and mastering. However, I would like to move to Universal Audio’s Luna if it becomes available for Windows.  If it doesn’t over the next few years, I may jump ship to Mac.

SCOPERISE:   So what's the deal with Luna - why is it so important when you already have a kick-ass Windows setup ?

DANTE: Digital recording really took off in the 1990's.  So we could produce our own material without the need to buy expensive tape based multitrack recorders.  Computers added to this with digital effects so we could not only have big track counts but effects as well.  The problem with the digital revolution is that we lost a lot of analog evolution.

SCOPERISE:   Why is analog evolution important?

DANTE: A lot of the analog gear that was used to make famous albums started to evolve in the 1950's.  Pulteq invented the EQP-1 equaliser in 1951 and it is one of the most revered and imitated pieces of gear in the world still today. It withstood market evolution.  Then we come to mixing desks, such as the Neve which kept on improving with technology since the 1960's.  The big artists demanded certain gear over the decades so its kind of like what I call the 'Darwin' of Audio effect.  The gear that survived the market did so because it kept on sounding better, and better and better.

SCOPERISE:   So what you're saying is that in going Digital in the 1990's, we had to start from scratch?

DANTE: Exactly.  With digital, we threw away the advantages of Analog, the warmth and punch that had been baked into the gear over the previous decades.  Same thing happened with Synthesizers.  In 1982 every keyboard player wanted a DX7, and your Moogs and Prophets were pushed to the back burner for a while until an analog renaissance in the early 2000's or so.  Likewise with audio recording gear, Universal Audio and Harrison have done a lot of research in emulating the analog circuitry of last century and that's exactly the sound I'm after.

SCOPERISE:   So what do you like most about your setup ?

DANTE: Its all rack mount, convenient, functional and aesthetically pleasing.