"I am Antonello D'Urso, I am 40 years old. I am a guitarist, producer, programmer, arranger, composer, sound engineer and AFAM teacher based in Italy. Since 2013, I have been touring and collaborating all over the world with top Italian pop rock stars and also sound engineer. I have played and collaborated with artists such as Vasco Rossi, Franco Battiato, Angelo Branduardi, Lucio Dalla, Luca Carboni, Alice, Giusy Ferreri, Jovanotti, Elisa, Tiziano Ferro, Gianni Morandi, Biagio Antonacci, and many more.
I mainly work as an arranger, producer and sound engineer in my own studio, where in parallel with music productions, I work on soundtracks in the field of advertising for brands such as Clementoni, Disney and BMW. I also collaborate with historical Italian studios such as Fonoprint (Bologna), Ex-Cantine (Imola), Over Studios (Cento, Ferrara). Besides all of this, I have also been an AFAM university teacher of pop rock guitar since 2018 until today at the State Conservatory of Music "Antonio Scontrino" in Trapani (TP).
On live, I use several acoustic guitars (6 and 12 strings). Some are tuned half a tone below. They all go through the Helix Floor where I set eq, dynamics efx, reverbs, delays. I control the Helix scenes with program changes. For my setup I used 2 identical systems to use redundancy (Mac Studio Pro with Ableton Live, Apollo UAD X16, iConnectivity MioXL, Radial SW8, LIOBOX, Nektar Pacer). I use different daws depending on their use. In the studio, my favourite daw is Pro Tools. However, on live, the most reliable daw for me is Ableton Live for its fluidity of use.
To prepare for this stadium show, the biggest production in Italy, we did about a month of musical rehearsals where we perfected every detail of music, sync and stage design. Usually in the morning before the convocation or after the lunch break I would make substantial changes on Ableton Live, change the set list, communicate the new LTC offsets, link the tracks that had to be mixed together. All very tiring but extremely beautiful. The technical issues of such a big show are the same as those of a small show in my opinion. Surely having a big stage in a stadium changes a lot from an audio and scenographic point of view. I think that if you can do your job on a small stage, then you can do it on a big stage.
LIOBOX has facilitated my work a lot. It is connected to the MioXL to use for redundancy. From the LIOBOX, I managed the play and stop of songs. In the show, the setlist management is crazy. I couldn't do without it. The setlist function is really super! With one click I managed the 2 computers with a very unique working simplicity. During rehearsals, pause mode (almost impossible on Ableton), rewind to a specific point in the song, skip songs...it was all easy, fast and professional. If there were to be an upgrade, adding two more pads on the LIOBOX would be great. Additionally, creating a "foot controller" version for guitarists like me, who often have their hands full while playing, would be a fantastic feature. I would be thrilled to use it."
