Davide "valanga" Raso
The Swiss born Music Producer and Audio Engineer, Davide "valanga" Raso brought Avalanche Sound Productions to life during his 2nd Semester at the Minneapolis Media Institute, when he was hired to produce and co-write Devon Worley's debut Cd "Careful what you ask for". With the help of his partner in crime Owen Sartori (songwriting, musical direction, vocal production) and mixing engineer Jason Miller, this production gathered 2 ICMA (Independent Country Music Association) nominations, one for "Best female artist of the year and one for "Best Indie Country Album of the year".
Davide's career began 20 years ago when he was fronting several bands in his home country Switzerland, as a vocalist and a guitar player. It was then when he discovered his talent for songwriting and music production, but had to put this dream on hold for a while. After he moved to the USA, he formed the local rock band Oceans, where he played guitar and was the main songwriter. Oceans debut CD "Endurance" was then produced and engineered by him, but felt he was lacking the knowledge and a foundation in Audio Engineering.
In 2009 he left the construction industry to follow his dream and passion and enrolled at the Minneapolis Media Institute to pursue his career in the Music and Recording Art Technology. His talent and hard work were brought to the attention of St.Paul Peterson (Fdeluxe, Kenny Loggins, Paula Abdul) and the late Tom Tucker sr. (Prince, Jonny Lang, Lucinda Williams), where Davide was mentored and helped to produce Devon Worley. During that time he was able to work with several artists from the Twin Cities, such as Tim Mahoney (The Voice TV Show), Ken Valdez, Fdeluxe, and Postina. For Devon's production Davide was able to hire Grammy Award winning Country Artist Bryan White to play acoustic guitar on one of the tracks, so did Chad Jeffers (Carrie Underwood, Keith Urban) where he was hired to lay tracks with pedal steel and ganjo.
After Davide graduated from MMI, he started to produce new upcoming artists from the Twin Cities such as The Goodnight Ritual, Becky Dalton and singer songwriter Ella Reid. On working with Ella, Davide was given 20 demos just with Ella's vocals and either piano or guitar track. He selected the 3 songs that had the most Radio Play quality and produced Ella's debut EP. This time Davide took the reins in all of the producer's aspects. He wrote all of the musical arrangements, strings arrangements, played all of the guitar parts, engineered and mixed the record.
Currently Davide is working with Minneapolis Artist Michael Ray , founder of The American Pop Music Experiment, where he's engineering (tracking and mixing)and co-producing a selections of songs on a journey through the American and Latin music landscape.