Tony Scott: 0:13

Welcome to The Jay Franze Show, a behind-the-curtain look at the entertainment industry, with insights you can't pay for and stories you've never heard. Now here's your host, Jay Franze.

Jay Franze: 0:42

Well, hello, hello, hello and welcome to the show. I am Jay Franze and this is your Backstage Pass to the Music Industry. This week we get to talk with a singer, a songwriter and a recording artist. We get to talk with Danni Stefanetti. We'll talk to her about her latest single, rock and Roll in my Soul, her relationship and production process with Jeff Panzer, and we'll discuss what she may have done differently if she had recorded this song with a band. Now, danni, she's been on the show a couple times in the past and I can't wait to catch up with her tonight. So if you would like to join in, comment or fire off any questions, please head over to jayfranze. com. Now let's get started. So why don't we just jump in? You have a new single out Rock and Roll in my Soul.

Jay Franze: 1:33

I do, let's go here and hear the backstory. How did this come about?

Danni Stefanetti: 1:38

So I got back from Nashville, it was like March 2023. And this is before I was producing my record and learning how to engineer a mix and record from my home studio, even like building that. Before I was a teenager, I was doing eight-track and four-track recordings analog and backing, singing with myself as a guitar.

Jay Franze: 2:01

This was in Australia.

Danni Stefanetti: 2:03

Yeah, this was in Australia and this was when I was in primary school and high school. But then when I came out to America, it was like 2023, and I just got back from Nashville and I said to my manager, what are we going to do now? And he said you should do a rock record. And I said, oh, I haven't done that since I was 17, when I was in school, and those times, you know, I looked out the electric guitar and I was coming out of that folk balladeer era that I was in, you know, and it really got me out of my shell and I'm, you know, I was coming out of that folk balladeer era that I was in you know, and it really got me out of my shell and I went back to that and rock and roll in my soul was one of the last songs that I wrote.

Danni Stefanetti: 2:41

Over two, two afternoons I wrote six songs each day, prolifically. I just pressed voice memo and the songs just wrote themselves literally like like the melody, the chords and everything. It was like a download that just came out and then that was one of them, but it wasn't like my favourite or anything out of all of the 12. But I played it for my co-producer and he said he's worked with Stevie Wonder and a lot of Motown artists and he said that would sound great with horns like brass. I said, wow, I've never done that Interesting. And he said that would sound great with horns like brass.

Danni Stefanetti: 3:13

I said wow, I've never done that Interesting. I said, but how are we going to do that? He's like, oh, you're going to learn how to do it and I was like what? And then I did and I listened to a lot of Chicago for reference and we literally like co-produced it over the phone and and like I was trying to work it out plug-ins and how to lay out thirds and fifths above, and I'm more a play-by-ear with the guitar, so this was a little bit like I nearly went crazy, like trying to do the horns, but we got there. We got there in the end. That's what it's about.

Jay Franze: 3:49

I know in the past we've talked about your harmonies when you were on here with William Lee Golden and we talked about harmony singing. He was talking about how he builds harmonies with the group and you were saying you do it all by ear. So is it the same exact approach you took with harmonies to the horns?

Danni Stefanetti: 4:05

Somewhat, but I wasn't quite sure where to put them because I'm so used to like guitar or keyboard layers. So it did take me listening to references like Chicago and other bands, for you were spinning, spinning Like I didn't quite know where to place them. So that's where Jeffrey's like Motown influence and Wilson Phillips and all the acts he's worked with, even hip hop, but they sometimes use brass. I think some of his references were like really great the way we combined both of our worlds in that, yeah, it wasn't something I would lean to and then we added cowbell in there, which wasn't something I personally wasn't cool with. That. But no, and I said I said this isn't a comedy like. This is a real rock song.

Jay Franze: 4:56

I don't want cowbell because I just remembered like saturday night live right and I started laughing like people are gonna be, like, you know, like saturday night live well, if you think about it, all the classic rock songs of the 70s and early 80s all had cowbell in them.

Danni Stefanetti: 5:14

It actually really worked, so we kept it. But it was a joke. At first you said imagine cowbell. I said no, no, no, come on try it, try it.

Jay Franze: 5:24

That's awesome Again. I mean the songs from the 70s and 80s all had cowbell in them, so I can understand it, because it kind of has that throwback feel. I said I was going to wait a minute to kind of give you my opinion. Yeah, I want to hear your it has an old school feel to it with a modern twist. So if you think back, like you mentioned chicago and it does kind of have a chicago feel, it kind of has that you know 70s to 80s rock feel, that late 70s, early 80s rock feel, which is my favorite time of music by far.

Jay Franze: 5:55

So to hear this was very cool, but it, like you mentioned that modern twist, really does a difference. So do you have anything specific that you you do that kind of kind of lends to that, that modern feel?

Danni Stefanetti: 6:08

well, a lot of, uh, my r, my influences are, you know, stevie Ray Vaughan with the guitar, but then modern. Like I study guitar players like John Mayer, who makes those bluesy riffs quite pop, so I do like bringing in pop and jazz into my rock riffs too. So I do like to keep the guitar sound even a little bit modern and the reverbs are like more of a, I don't know. I like kept them very airy, like a, like Maya would, I guess, and that.

Jay Franze: 6:42

PRS just sounds amazing too. You play a PRS, which is a more modern guitar. Exactly Do you feel like that lends a lot to your, your sound. Is it kind of a signature of yours?

Danni Stefanetti: 6:51

It could be. Yeah, for sure, and I don't use heavier delays or anything like that. I keep it quite airy and floaty and I think, because my vocals are younger and I think that could make it modern as well, it's just my vocal styling, perhaps. Yeah, yeah, no yeah, no, absolutely.

Jay Franze: 7:15

But let's go back. You said co-producer, so that means you're producing the song yourself with jeffrey, jeffrey panzer. So can you kind of explain that dynamic, that working relationship that the two of you have?

Danni Stefanetti: 7:28

yeah, so, um, he's managing me and we did this Danni's Diamond record together. He was over the phone so we weren't in the same room, but I was studying tutorials for a long time, trying to like work out how to record and get my. You know, I basically started this with very little gear a microphone, an interface, a new laptop and a TV dinner stand with my cup of tea. I didn't even record this album with a keyboard mini. I didn't even have the keyboard yet. I had to use the, the keyboard of my laptop, to do a lot of the strings and the horns and things like.

Jay Franze: 8:10

I just used what I had, literally so are you programming letters to match notes?

Danni Stefanetti: 8:17

I had to just go on my ear because I now that I have a midi that shows me, you know, when you do a c chord and you have right and d's and all that.

Danni Stefanetti: 8:25

You you know where you are, like a guitar, but with, with the notes from the keyboard mini on the, the laptop, that you don't even know what note you're pressing. So I literally had to just remember. It took a little bit longer. Trust me, I wouldn't recommend it, but sometimes you just have to use what you have at the time and just go with it and not let anything stop you. And that was that's why I feel like just completing this album and doing using what we had at the time kind of made it like even more so rewarding because we could have stopped at so many levels of the project. I mean, when I had written this, the album, in the two days, I was nearly just going to work out a budget, hire session players and then figure out a studio. And then I was like, well, gee, this is turning into something I don't know. Do I want to do a whole album? I'm not on a label. And then one thing led to another me just having to work it out with what I had.

Jay Franze: 9:30

Well, I love that you say that.

Danni Stefanetti: 9:32

Yeah.

Jay Franze: 9:32

I do. I love that you say that you use the tools that you had. Yeah, back when I used to teach at the Audio Engineering College, we used to issue a laptop with a Pro Tools interface, right, and that's what the students had and it gave them more than enough tools to be able to do the projects that we needed within the school. But the students used to think to themselves well, you know, I could never use this in the real world. But the reality is now you're using that to do much more than we were doing back then and to get that through somebody's head that you don't have to always have all of the tools. You don't have to have the best microphone or the best guitar or the best recording system. You just use what you have and you build from there. Yeah, and I think it's amazing that you actually took a traditional keyboard and played the instrument the keyboard instrument off of a keyboard, because I know you didn't just program it by pressing keys, you actually played the keys on the keyboard. Is that correct?

Danni Stefanetti: 10:31

Yeah, yeah I mean, but then I I had to some of the instruments I don't actually play, you know, like I don't, I don't, I'm not a, I'm not a horn player, I'm not a, you know. But then there was some keyboard lines where I'm not like a piano player. So sometimes I'd have to make the guitar sound like a piano or different things. I'd use the guitar, because I knew my way around that, to try and make that sound like a piano or different things. I used the guitar because I knew my way around that to try and make that sound like a different instrument, because I knew I could have the feeling of it. So I knew I could play the bass, but I had to play the bass with not a bass guitar.

Danni Stefanetti: 11:01

I played it with electric and I made that sound like a bass you know, because I didn't have one lying around, so I just had to do it and figure it out and turn the octaves down and all that you know.

Jay Franze: 11:12

Well, I was going to ask you what tools are you using to do that?

Danni Stefanetti: 11:16

I used. There was like an octave. I think I brought it down 12 octaves or something like that. I figured out it was a tutorial on it, yeah.

Jay Franze: 11:24

I know you mentioned MIDI earlier and I know you can use MIDI. You can use a guitar to trigger. Midi as well, I've seen some people use it to play piano on songs.

Danni Stefanetti: 11:33

I was like what else can I make the guitar sound like yeah, how can I make myself sound like a full band? Obviously, the drums weren't guitars, the drums were drums. But there's amazing templates and you can loop things and it's just amazing technology these days tools are tools are absolutely fantastic these days, so you're recording this song at your place on your, your laptop.

Jay Franze: 12:01

So let's get back to that relationship between you and jeffrey. How does that work when he's listening over the phone?

Danni Stefanetti: 12:08

yeah, sometimes we had to use facetime or um over the phone, and I would. What I'd do is, every time I'd have like a new mix, I would uh send him that like drop box it to him so that he could listen to it at his speakers, and then he would call me back with his notes and then I'd go fix it. And sometimes that would be like 20 different mixes I'd send within the space of like 10 minutes and it's like back and forward, back and forward, and it's the way we did it well that is pretty cool that again, technology the technology allows us to do that.

Jay Franze: 12:37

Right, you mentioned facetime. You can facetime somebody and they can see what you're doing, they can hear what you're playing. So it's really cool that you guys are utilizing technology in that way. So you mentioned originally hiring musicians. You thought of hiring musicians, but you chose to do this 100% yourself. So is there anything that you would have done differently if you had a team of musicians play with you?

Danni Stefanetti: 13:03

Well, the reason we did it like that is because Jeffrey Pantzer, you know he's worked with Lil Wayne and Nicki Minaj and Drake and a lot of the best. And when I met him through a mutual friend who also is in the music video world, you know he works for Universal as a TV and music video executive and he was the one that dealt with the music budgets. Right, because he comes from artists in the hip-hop world that have got a big budget. But as an indie, like you know, I'm using what we have with DIY.

Danni Stefanetti: 13:43

Sometimes we're in the inner studio and I know if you feel this, but sometimes I felt this when you're paying for something and and you've got like six hours in the studio and people are waiting on you and you just wrote the song, you've got a little bit of pressure on you, like to like nail that thing, whereas we didn't have that pressure when we were just taking our time, like having fun with it. You know, if the drums didn't feel right, it wasn't the right groove. We're like let's pull up toto and see the entrance of how they did it. Oh, that's the sound. That's the sound, whereas sometimes when you're in a studio, like, you've got that pressure of like there's a manager, there's an agent, there's a label waiting for you to finish something in five hours or one hour and it doesn't have that feeling like we took our time to really find.

Danni Stefanetti: 14:35

Now let's scrap that whole like two hours we spent and start again, because that's not the right tempo, you know. But when you've already started something with session players, you got to get it right. And if you don't start it right, sometimes like it's just not, it doesn't have the vibe, and that's why I actually prefer to do it this way and then maybe take it to like a drummer and like he could play over the top of it. But I like the fact next time I would even do it the same and even do it as a demo maybe first, and then bring in a bass player to basically copy what I've done but amplify it.

Jay Franze: 15:13

That was what I was thinking so, when you do things like this, what are some of the challenges that you face?

Danni Stefanetti: 15:21

well, it's a lot of um, it's like a lot of educating yourself and I think a lot of it is a mental like. We have these mental restrictions that sometimes, if someone else isn't cheering us on, it's so easy to stop even before you've started. See, I could have stopped right at the uh, let's not do an album, then let's just do a single, like we'll just get. I don't want to learn it, that would take too long. And actually that's just do a single, we'll just get. Oh, I don't want to learn it, that would take too long.

Danni Stefanetti: 15:50

And actually that's how I was thinking. I was like, no, I'm an artist, I'm a songwriter, I like the engineer. Then I can just get in the feel of it and play my song and someone else is worrying about the buttons, then I can just feel it. You know, that's how I used to think. So it's like I can one night in the middle of the night, wake up and go oh, I got this beat, this idea, this riff, and I want to put it down and I can. So yeah, it's an option, you know.

Jay Franze: 16:27

Do you think that you'll go back in the studio at some point and re-record some of these songs?

Danni Stefanetti: 16:34

um, probably not the danni's diamonds we record, but there's like a couple of new ones I want to actually record. Every time we we release the single, sometimes we tweak a few things on the mix. Like if you hear it after six months you go oh, actually there's a few things I want to change. But sometimes we don't do that, because once you start you start finding errors and then it changes the whole song and it's like oh, we should have left it alone, nice. So yeah, I think the magic is there and we're like on to new things now. Like there was a new song we wrote and I kind of want to like start that sooner than later.

Jay Franze: 17:14

Well, that happens a lot, right, you hear something in your head. As the artist, you always want to make it better. You can always think of something else to do, and we could probably go too far at times. I always reference my wife laughing at me for listening to the same song over and over and over again when I'm mixing a song. And I asked her, I said, well, don't you hear the difference? And she's like no, no, I don't hear the difference, because we're so dialed in and we hear the most minute things and the average listener doesn't hear those things. They're not listening for maybe that one note that you played in the second chorus. They're just grooving along with the feel of the song. So I think what's going to happen and what you know you might end up doing, is when you form your live band and you go, go out and you perform these songs live. That's when things are going to start coming together. You're going to play the songs.

Jay Franze: 18:02

You're going to get a feel for the way other people are doing it yeah probably spark a few more ideas, exactly, and then maybe at that point you go in and pick a song or two go in and do a different way we could do an alternate version.

Danni Stefanetti: 18:14

But you know how it is like. When you got a co-producer and you're collabing on something, it usually starts with it's just a normal day in your life, right, and you get a call from your co-producer and you haven't heard the song in a couple of months and you're really happy with it. It's mixed, it's mastered. And you get a call and they're like hey, I've been listening to whatever the song is, like, call your name or something. And just on the three minutes 21 or whatever. I know you don't want to hear this, but I hate to say this, but I think we should change this bit at this drum roll or something. And you're just like you know, at the end of the day it's like the last thing you want to hear. No, well, let me listen to it again. But in your head you're like no, I don't want to hit. No, well, let me listen to it again. But in your head you're like no, I don't want to change it.

Jay Franze: 18:59

It's done. What do you mean? I think that one note could be a little louder. That means I gotta redo everything.

Danni Stefanetti: 19:04

I'm not gonna redo everything so that. But that's a good thing. You can just like pull it up again and see what what's going on. But usually, like, when I've finished a song and I've put it in the vaults, I've kind of like finished it. But the collaborations, everybody's going to hear something different. So you kind of I've learned to be a bit more open-minded, to like listen and hear if there is a valid point there, because sometimes it does need adjusting. There are a few things on Rock and Roll In my Soul that before you put it out, we just have to make a couple of changes. And when I was in the moment of recording it I was very stubborn. I was like no, no, those lyrics like they're good. They're good. Instead of jambalaya it was love you likey, which makes no sense to anybody, and but I liked it. You know I'm glad we changed it to jambalaya.

Jay Franze: 19:54

That's all I'm gonna say well, now that the song's been out for a couple of days, I mean what's the? Reaction been.

Danni Stefanetti: 20:02

It's been great. The music video yeah, people really loving it. I've had some really nice messages and we're releasing it on my birthday the actual audio and it's one of those songs, like it's at the end of the show. It's the last song I sing because it's at the end of the show.

Jay Franze: 20:23

it's the last song I sing because it's the most like uplifting and driving song I feel like you're on a back of a motorbike or something on a date and you're just like driving. It's that kind of song that's pretty cool. Speaking of imagery, you know you put a video together. Can you tell us about the video?

Danni Stefanetti: 20:30

yeah, so that was a fun video. So I was out there in new kuiper performing arts center opening for a Farner of Grand Funk Railroad and he's a real rocker. So I rehearsed an hour set the big stage, we had sound techs, we had the whole thing and I had a really exciting time up there and a whole lot of coffee. Like you could tell, I was just like amped up and that was the last song of the night. It was a rock and roll in my soul. Our friend, evan B Stone and his daughter Zoe drove up from LA to come and film it. He was on stage I was trying not to trip up on him and they did a great job of it. Then, jeffrey and him, they edited it. They used their creative direction to put all beautiful elements of horns and drums and different imagery in there. I loved what Jeff created and when Evan was editing it and they spent some time to really make that beautiful and I was just blown away with what I saw.

Jay Franze: 21:33

That's a good point. Jeffrey's not only a co-producer when it comes to your audio, but he's also helping you produce these videos oh, yeah, yeah, he's executive producing the videos and that's what he, you know.

Danni Stefanetti: 21:45

He, his career, is known for the, the music videos that he's created. His videos have got billions of views and he's working with a little artist like me, you know, and it gets a couple of thousand views. So I'm very lucky to have him, um, I'm lucky to have him doing my videos and creative direction, like with these beautiful, uh, imagery and um, yeah, very lucky a big thanks to Danni for taking the time to share stories with us and thank you for taking the time to hang with me here.

Jay Franze: 22:17

I really do appreciate it. If you know anyone that would enjoy hearing Danni's story, please be sure to pass this along. You can do that and find the links to everything mentioned over at jayfranze. com/ episode 99. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you next week.

Tony Scott: 22:36

Thanks again for listening and I'll see you next week. Thanks for listening to The Jay Franze Show. Make sure you visit us at jayfranze. com Follow, connect and say hello.