About

About Me

My name is Daniel Fantauzzi, i'm a 25 year old multi-instrumentalist currently residing  in Toronto, Canada. This website exists as a way for me to share my work with the rest of the world in regards to the realms of sound and music design. I compose original music for my self and for projects as the opportunities present them selves (game and film). I also do sound effect related work, mainly for games, though i'd love to try my hand at movies as well.

About The Music

I compose a wide variety of styles of music, based on the mood i'm in, or the project i'm working on. I tend to enjoy merging different genres of music. You will often find me mixing orchestral / symphonic music with heavy rock which is one of my favorite styles to write in. While i've composed music in a wide range of genres, a general trait of all my music is that it tends to be progressive in nature (in the literal sense of the word), meaning that my pieces often start off slow or fairly quiet and eventually work their way up to strong, powerful finales. I've always enjoyed this style of music as it often imparts a sense of awe to the listener if done correctly. I have no idea if my music does this for people or not, but I do try!

As evidenced by my range of composition style, the influences on my sound are also largely spread out, including (obviously!) prog rock gods Pink Floyd, Deep Purple and, more recently, Porcupine Tree, to far flung doom metal guys like Anathema, Agalloch, and Opeth and on to Film Composers such as Clint Mansell, Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer and Videogame composer Jeremy Soule. I even like a good mix of acid jazz and ambient thrown in by groups such as The Cinematic Orchestra.

The Gear

Since it's likely that a lot of the people that visit this page will also be recording musicians or home studio dabblers I suppose it's worth while to mention that i'm a bit of a gear head like so many others. I love all the technology and equipment involved in modern recording, it's just a shame that it's sometimes too expensive to obtain for your average chucklehead like me. Because of this, and because of my inherently cheap nature, I'm often forced to find alternative means to achieve or obtain the desired results. This has ranged from me scratch building my own 12 piece electronic drum kit because I couldn't justify the $3000 kits sold by roland, to me building my own desk from scratch (see picture) because I couldn't find anything suitable locally, to me even making my own broadband sound absorbers because the ones sold locally sucked and were insanely more expensive.

I'm also a big supporter of small companies that try to offer true value to it's customers. Companies like Voxengo and Cockos both offer superb plugins and software that in many cases (to my ears anyways) exceed what is often considered the "industry standard" in quality among studios for much less. Price and brand name should not be the deciding factors on hardware or software, it should be your EARS. It's just a shame so many people forget this. I routinely play acoustic guitars priced in the $500 range that sound better and are a lot more playable than many $2000 guitars. The same is often true of software, with many plug-ins offering excellent or better quality than what is often considered the "top dog" by many studios, the same studios, mind you, which produce absolutely crushed, clipped and unlistenable music... Which leads me on to my final topic..

Mastering!

If you download and listen to any of my music, you will no doubt notice it's not as loud as other songs you might have (especially pop music). I value sonic dynamics and clarity and refuse to get into the "loudness" war that almost all modern music is engaged in. The better quality your headphones or speakers are, the more noticeable this atrocity to music becomes. Essentially I try to push my music as loud as it will go before there is any audible clipping of the waveform or noticeable loss of intended dynamics. Typically this means most of my music is mastered to an average of -14 dBFS, sometimes more, sometimes less depending on the individual songs requirement.

Some modern songs these days exceed -10 db (or more!), which is just insane. Modern compression techniques are killing the musicality of music. Music is not supposed to be a crushed, square wave, it is supposed to be paid attention to and enjoyed for all the glory of it's dips and valleys.. the dynamics. Average listeners won't care about this, but for guys who care about how their music sounds, or who own higher quality equipment where the differences between insane compression and hard limiting are more noticeable, I hope you appreciate it. If it's not loud enough, turn up your damn volume, that's what the control is there for!

For other musicians or DIY home recordists who might be interested, below you'll find a detailing of all my instruments and hardware / software that I use. I will update this information periodically as necessary.

HARDWARE

System 1: Custom built Intel Core 2 Duo system running Windows Vista 64-Bit with 4 gigs of memory.

System 2: Custom built Intel Core I5 quad core system, running Windows 7 64-bit with 8 gigs of memory.

Presonus FP10 Firepod Audio Interface

ART PB4x4 Power Distribution System

ART Gold MPA Tube Mic Pre-Amp

ART Headamp 6 Headphone Distributor

Behringer Miniamp Headphone distributor

Behringer Ultrapatch Patch Bay

M-Audio BX5A Near-Field Active Monitors

M-Audio Keyrig 49 MIDI Control keyboard

AKG K240S Open Back Headphones

Audio Technica ATH-M40 Closed Back Monitoring Headphones

Custom Built 12 piece electronic drum kit, with Alesis Trigger I|O MIDI Controller

ART M-Two Large Condenser Microphone

MXL 2001 Large Condenser Microphone

Shure SM57 Dynamic Microphone

2 Apex 185 Matched Pencil Condenser Microphones

INSTRUMENTS

Vox Standard 24 Electric Guitar (~1979)

Gibson Les Paul Epiphone

Art & Lutherie Acoustic 6-String Cutaway

Takamine G-series 12-string Dreadnought

Fender Squier P-Bass

Native Indian "Spirit" Flute (Handmade.. spiritwalker?)

SOFTWARE (Major plug-ins relevant to my sound listed only, otherwise too many to list )

Cockos Reaper (Primary DAW)

Sony Soundforge 10 (dedicated wave editing)

Garritan Personal Orchestra 4

XLN Audio Addictive Drums (Plus ADPAKS)

IK Multimedia Amplitube 3

IK Multimedia Sampletank

Native Instruments Kontakt 4 (Plus additional libraries)

Voxengo (Various)

Nomad Factory (Various)