Check out the Official Trailer.

Click on the picture and scroll to the right to see the entire mixer (don’t give up on scrolling… it’s just terribly long!)

Here you can watch the Official Trailer.

The dramatic final sequence and the end credits of the short movie “Il sogno” with Mauro Marin, Benedetta Riccio and Victoria Zinny

Here you can watch the Official Trailer.

The Music page, now, allows the users to easily preview the audio content and to share it with their friends on Facebook. You can even share these News with your friends to update them about Luigi.

The score for the final sequence of “Prime of your Life“, a romantic comedy directed by Kelly L. King and produced by Nicole Abisinio.

You can watch the trailer of the movie HERE.

The SCL MENTOR PROGRAM is designed for only eight composers of underscore for film, television and video games. During the course of the three month program, the eight participants (four in the Fall term, four in the Spring term) have the opportunity to interface extensively with working film and television composers who generously volunteer their time and expertise to introduce the interns to the profession of film scoring. Previous shows observed have included: the STAR TREK series, JAG, THE SIMPSONS, and SEVENTH HEAVEN and various films. Activities include sitting in on many recording sessions; meetings with major agents, music supervisors and performing rights societies; and spending time one-on-one with one of our mentor composers (including orchestrating and composing practice exercises from the sessions which have been observed).

SCL Mentor Program Director Christopher Farrell has just called Luigi to tell him that the audio and video material he sent for the application earned him one of the four positions available for the Fall term, from September 1st to December 15th. The composers selected for the SCL Mentor Program will be officially announced during the next days on the SCL website.

Watch a VIDEO where composer Alan Silvestri, SCL Advisory Board Member, talks about the SCL.

The cues range from modern styles to dark orchestral underscore, blended with electronic elements: you can listen to some of them in the MUSIC section. This is the OFFICIAL TRAILER.

The EP of the Original Soundtrack will be released soon on iTunes by Soundiva.

The MASS (Most Advanced Sample Server) allows you to reach these incredible results as simply as you imagine it!

The MASS, entirely developed by Luigi putting together the best technologies in the market such as Intel Xeon, Windows 7 Professional 64 bit, Vienna Ensemble Pro (with a particular attention to silent operations), is the most advanced sample server ever built, powered by a Dual Intel Xeon with 64 GB of RAM: nobody can ask for more!

With the MASS, Luigi’s setup can count on an unprecedented power in managing sample libraries, but also in the signal flow of audio channels routing to Cubase mixing environment thanks to the exceptional features of Vienna Ensemble Pro:

• 128+ instrument routed to the mixer as separated stereo tracks
• 12 groups with 6 different convolution reverbs for the best mixing environment
• 300+ orchestral articulations with more than 15,000 samples (only counting the tracks connected to the Vienna Instruments)
• a permanent template always ready to go, with no loading time
• all audio connections flows through the LAN
• a constant latency of 64 samples (1.5 ms at 44.1 kHz)

And, most important, the MASS can be used in a cross-platform environment. It doesn’t matter if you work with Cubase, Nuendo, Logic Digital Performer or ProTools: as long as you have Vienna Ensemble Pro installed on your main DAW computer (MAC or PC), the MASS can work as a sample library server as it were an incredibly powerful and fully configurable sound expander.

To see some pictures, go to the GALLERY OF MASS

The thesis included a project for a new audio sample server, called MASS (Main Audio Sample Server). The project was entirely developed by Luigi as a projectual part of his final work at university.

The video “Percorsi della Milano Antica” (“Paths through the Ancient Milan“) is about an archaelogical project led in Milan by Bicocca University and refers the results of studies and virtual simulations of ancient buildings dating back to the Roman Age.

Komplete 6 collects the new Kontakt 4, Absynth 5, Battery 3, Reaktor 5, Guitar Rig Pro 4, Massive, FM8.

HERE you can see the connection of the studio.

The Original Score was composed by Christopher Young and Luigi was a score coordinator while working at Chris’s studio in Los Angeles during the entire project. Thanks to Chris, Brandon C., Curt, Kostas, Andrew, Mark, Dave, Jonathan, Brandon V., Laurent, Joohyun, Samantha and Katie for the wonderful experience!

Visit the Official Website for the trailer.

Now you can search for, preview and download music in two different formats
(CBR 320 kbps MP3 and PCM 16bit/48kHz WAV).

Log in and check it HERE.

Farewell, Emy…

One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn’t be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school—she said, “you’re WASTING your SAT scores.” On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture—why would anyone bother with music? And yet—from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”

On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day. At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang “We Shall Overcome”. Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heart-wrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.

I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings—people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship bet ween invisible internal objects.

I’ll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written during Worl d War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier—even in his 70’s, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in t he front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: “During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?”

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year’s freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:

“If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevys. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.

The Original Score was composed by Christopher Young and Luigi was a score coordinator while working at Chris’s studio in Los Angeles during the entire project.

The Showreel 2009. I’m distributing the DVD containing the Show Reel 2009. If you want a copy, please contact me and I will be more than happy to send it to you.

Christopher Young scored the film and Luigi worked on it as a score coordinator, assisting Chris particularly during the initial researches about Italian avant-guard music, suggested by Sam as a musical reference.

There are some tricks you can try to have the possibility to put the iPod in pause after each track.

Solution 1: The silent song

The most common suggestion you can find surfing the web regards the creation of a playlist where you put the same "silent" audio file after each track, as in the following example:
Song1
silence
Song2
silence
Song3
silence
…
SongN
silence

The silent file can be as long as you need and in general it could be enough 10-20 seconds just to have the time to manually pause the silent track and skip to the next track, to be ready for the next song.

Pro:
Once put in pause, the next track is immediately available for playback as soon as you push the play/pause button.
The next track is simply selected pressing the ">>|" button.

Cons:
If you forget to press the play/pause button before the end of the silent song, the next track starts playing back anyway.

Solution 2: The use of iPod’s Notes

The new generations of iPods have a Notes Reader that allows you to read text files on the screen. These files can be stored in the "Notes" folder that you can see browsing the iPod as a common external hard drive (to enable this feature you need to check the "Enable Disk Use" option under iTunes). The Notes Reader reads any ".txt" file stored in the Notes Folder of your iPod.

The Notes syntax allows you to write your notes as an hypertext, with links to other texts, to photos, to videos and, obviously, to songs.
An example of using notes as a live performance playlist feature is given below:

<title>My playlist</title>
1. <a href="Song=Song Title 1">Song Title 1</a>
2. <a href="Song=Song Title 2">Song Title 2</a>
3. <a href="Song=Song Title 3">Song Title 3</a>
…   …   …

where "Song Title 1", Song Title 2" and "Song Title 3" are titles as you can read them under iTunes. The example above is displayed by the Notes Reader as follow:

1. Song Title 1
2. Song Title 2
3. Song Title 3

and you can navigate through the page with the wheel and activate a link with the center button. The <title> tag specifies the title of the note in the Notes list of your iPod.

By default, when you fire a link, the Now Playing page shows up and, at the end of the selected song, it comes back to the note you were reading. But you can change this behavior, setting a preference of the note with the following code:

<title>My playlist</title>
<meta name="NowPlaying" content="false">
1. <a href="Song=Song Title 1">Song Title 1</a>
2. <a href="Song=Song Title 2">Song Title 2</a>
3. <a href="Song=Song Title 3">Song Title 3</a>

With that setting, when you activate a link, you continue viewing the note during the playback. 

Pro:
This is a real "autopause" system, as it stops after each track without any need to control it.
You can easily navigate through the note with the wheel searching for a song in the list.

Cons:
The latency between your pressing the center button (to activate the link) and the song starting playing back can be of 1-2 seconds.
Once a song ended, you need to manually select the next one moving to the next link with the wheel.

This music accompanies a slideshow reporting the results of the HIV project led by COSV in the Murang’a District of Kenya.

THE TRAILER (description in Italian)

The movie, world prémiered during the opening night of the Festival, contains a cue composed and orchestrated by Luigi.

CLICK HERE if you want to watch the official trailer.

Thus, if you want to load an instance of a typical EWQL VST instrument, you may notice that, whatever the MIDI channel of the events contained into the track is, all the MIDI data is transmitted to the plugin on the channel number 1. This fact makes impossible to use the slots from 2 to 8 and forces you to load one instance of the plugin for each instrument, wasting a lot of memory and resources.

Using the EWQL Symphonic Choirs, though, it happened to me to find out that the WordBuilder, which in Cubase is loaded as a MIDI plugin, could work perfectly inside an Instrument Track, although it’s necessary for it to spread MIDI data to 5 different channels of the Kompakt player. It was reasonable to think that the WordBuilder shouldn’t work at all, as the Instrument Track can transmit only on channel 1, while to make the choir sing you need to have access to the first five slots of the player.

This experiment made me consider that a MIDI plugin loaded into an Instrument Track changes the MIDI channel of the data AFTER the track itself forced the events on the channel 1. So I found a trick to apply a similar approach with any kind of Multichannel Plugins. My idea is to apply a kind of “transformation” by a MIDI plugin to convert some events to be transmitted on a different channel from channel 1.
The first problem is to find a way to “filter” which events inside the Instrument Track you want to be transmitted on a different channel. To do that, I chose the “NoteOff Velocity“. I believe this parameter is not used by any plugin around, so it shouldn’t be a limiting choice.

The procedure is quite simple, once you got the philosophy behind it.
Selecting the notes you want to transmit on – let’s say – channel 4, you set their Note-Off-Velocity (NOV, from here on) to “4″.
Then you open an instance of the “Transformer” MIDI plugin and you set the “Filter Traget” to the notes with NOV (“Value 3” for notes corresponds to NOV) equal to 4 and the “Action Target” to channel set to a the fixed value of “4″. The detailed procedure is described below:

1. create an instrument track and choose which plugin you want to use
2. create a MIDI part inside the track and open it in the Key Editor
3. record or manual insert the notes
4. change the NOV of the events you want to transmit to a different channel, setting it to the value of the channel, as you can see in the following picture (for channel 4)



5. load an instance of the “Transformer” inside the Track



6. configure it as it’s shown in the picture below (for channel 4)

After you configured the Transformer as above, every notes having a NOV value equal to “4″ are transmitted by the track on the channel 4.

You can have many notes trasmitting on a different channel even inside the same MIDI part. Obviously, to ease the way you can see and manage the notes transmitted to different channels, it could be more comfortable to set the “Lane Display Type” to “Lane Fixed” so you can see overlapping MIDI parts as parts above each other, like in the following picture. 

From this point of view, the “Lane Fixed” display type lets you see the parts inside an Instrument (or a MIDI) Track in a multitrack-style, so you can easily remember what channel the part is transmitting on.

This trick has some side-effects, though:

1. you can’t have more than 5 channels per Instrument Track
2. all the controllers are transmitted only on channel 1, as they are not transformed by the MIDI plugins (they transform only the notes)
3. as the Instrument Track has only one audio output in the Cubase mixer, you have to mix the different channels inside the player and you can’t have separated effects for each channel

However, there are situations where these are not limitations at all. An example is the Spectrasonics Stylus RMX plugin: with this trick you can play it through an Instrument Track, using up to 5 of its grooves, having the possibility to mix them inside Stylus itself.

The professionalism of his result was recognized by Nicola Piovani himself, who said:

«This work astonishes for the accuracy used to create an hollywood-like sound, giving to a 18-minutes-long short with only three characters the same atmosphere of a feature movie. Even agreeing that this approach represents a personal choice, which maybe I wouldn’t have used for a work like that, we cannot deny the musical abilities and the scoring skills that made of this work a professional score, way beyond the intentions of this Master Class»

Nicola Piovani, composer
(Academy Award 1999 for “The Life is Beautiful”)

The movie, in post-production, could use some cues composed and orchestrated by Luigi as an additional composer.

This is the PICTURE GALLERY of my residency.

I know what I leave.
I can only imagine what I will find on the other side of the Earth…

Bye, Italy. I will miss you (or actually not, maybe…).

Thanks to Christopher Young and his “Tilden House Residency Program”
(www.tildenhouseresidency.com), I will have the chance to share a fantastic experience with other three young composers, to try to build a career in film music industry.

They published my following compositions:

• Amy
• Cruisers and choppers
• Final battle
• Remembrance
• Away from you
• Earth
• For my lover
• Nude swim
• The ballad
• Us
• Young
• Back from Russia
• Notturno sul mare
• Shine in your eyes

Maybe you will listen to some of them in a future TV project!

I’m writing the score and you can listen to the first result, the Main Theme, in the Music » Comedy section.

A funny jazz band theme with brass and woodwinds, but also strings and marimba to create the right atmosphere of this bright play.

Captain Achab recalls his wife and his never-known son and wonders if it was worth to lose everything to follow the white whale.

Captain Achab launches his last attack to the white whale and finds the death over its back.

Hope you’ll enjoy them!

Have a nice time listening to my music!