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Content by Alessandro:
How to Support Your Team as a Session Musician
5 Essential Ingredients to Master Your Instrument
Alessandro Lani
Music Creator, Influencer
Alessandro is an LA based guitar player from Italy. His credits include platinum artist, NIKKOLE, Grammy nominated producer Leon Sylver III, Ghostface Killah, and Puff Daddy producer K-Def.
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Hi Alessandro, thank you for joining us today at VQS Studio.
Take us back in time to how you first fell in love with music.
I was 11 years old. I remember it was a Saturday afternoon, because that was the time of the week when my father and I used to take the car and drive through the hills of the region I come from. It was just the way we used to take a break in our busy week.
I found a box with three CDs in it.
The music was all from what is probably the most commercially successful Italian artist of all time and the only true rockstar we have in Italy: his name is Vasco Rossi. The box was called “Vasco Rossi: The Platinum Collection”. I had just bought that collection and I didn’t know Vasco as good as I know him now. I got to listen some tracks rarely before that moment but I wasn’t too much into his music.
I consider myself a hard rock guitar player,
but sometimes I can go further into heavy metal.
The three CDs were respectively called Rock, Ballad and Live. At that moment I wanted to listen to his LIVE performances. I wanted to choose to listen to the record randomly.
I chose the second track of the CD which is called “C’è chi dice no” (English: “Somebody says no”). When I heard the opening riff I was literally blown away. So simple, perfect and heavy.
I spent the days after watching more Vasco performances and I fell in love with his guitar players: Maurizio Solieri and Stef Burns. The years after I started to listen to English and American hard rock. At 13 years old I took my first guitar lesson.
What core values do you believe are necessary for success?
• Stubbornness
• hard work
• right teachers/mentors.
Who have been some of your favorite people/projects to work with?
We used to play in bars and squares mostly in my town, it was quite fun.
When I was in Italy I played for 6 years with a band formed with my high school friends. We started to cover American and English rock/blues tunes from the 70s and 80s. Then we switched our repertoire in Italian pop/rock music.
I also played with my guitar teacher. We formed an acoustic trio (me and my teacher playing guitar plus a singer). We had a repertoire of American and English pop music and songs from the great Italian songwriters of the 70s.
We used to play my teacher original music too. We used do busking and attend contests for new artists.
We were kicked out by almost all of them at the first round, but we had fun traveling and playing with each other.
Here in L.A. I started running an activity as a session guitar player, playing in other people’s records. In September I connected with Leon Sylver III: former bass player of the family group “The Sylvers” very active in the 70s. He is a Grammy nominated producer now.
He gave me the opportunity to play in NIKKOLE’s record. NIKKOLE is a platinum selling singer/songwriter who reached position #7 and #20 of the Billboard Dance Club Songs chart respectively with her songs “Gonna Get It Right” and “Zero”.
I also started a collaboration with K-Def: Hip-Hop producer who collaborated with Puff Daddy and Ghostface Killah. I also had other collaboration and I have others to come. I also developed a relationship with Koch Amps (the amp company I would like to be endorsed by) and I am on the way of shooting a promotional video for the Studiotone XL head.
What future opportunities would you like to be involved with?
I would like that other opportunities like the ones with NIKKOLE and K-Def will come up and maybe that there will be the chance to play live again in the future.
I would love to be a touring and session guitarist. I also want to start my own band (guitar player, singer, bass player, drummer and maybe keyboard player) and start publishing and playing my own music.
