Paul DiFranco

Position:

Distinguished Adjunct Assistant Professor, Music Production & Recording Technology, Film Studies

Location:

Vickers Communication Center

Phone:

540-665-4600

Email: pdifranc@zhenrenqi.com

Employed Since:

2011

Conservatory Professional Highlights:

Paul DiFranco is a forty-nine year veteran of the entertainment industry. He began his career as a stage musician in New York City, playing in numerous Bronx honky-tonks and Jersey juke joints. Soon thereafter he built, owned and operated Soho Sound, a 24-track recording and production studio. As a record producer he worked at Columbia Records and RCA Records, producing artists such as Reunion, The Earls, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Don Imus. He has been a music publisher since 1973 and has worked for Bourne Music and Reno-Metz Music, large independent publishers. He was responsible for numerous hits by artists including Lou Rawls, Isaac Hayes, Englebert Humperdinck, Ronnie Spector, Willie Nelson, Joe Cocker, Natalie Cole, Jim Ed Brown and Helen Cornelius and others.

In the 1980s he moved into film and television. DiFranco founded the film music department at Roger Corman’s Concorde Pictures and worked as Roger’s worldwide VP of Music for 11 years, also creating and running Roger’s record company, Cinemadisc Records. Following that, DiFranco was hired by Miles Copeland to create a music department for his IRS Media Films, running the department as VP Music for six years.

DiFranco spent five years working at the Fox Family Channel, now ABC Family, where he was post production and music supervisor and voice casting director for hundreds of cartoon shows such as Digimon and Flint The Time Detective.

For the last sixteen years DiFranco has been music supervisor for Universal Studios, Sony Pictures and Queen Latifah’s Flavor Unit. He specializes in high-volume music pictures such as the Bring It On films, the American Pie movies and Soul Surfer. In all, DiFranco has music supervised and produced over three hundred feature films and more than two hundred TV episodes. Click here for a partial filmography.

DiFranco is regarded as a “full service” music supervisor in that he not only performs all of the creative and logistic work on a film, he also negotiates and writes all of the music contracts required for the picture, and secures all necessary music licenses.

Since 2011 DiFranco has been a Distinguished Adjunct Assistant Professor at Shenandoah Conservatory, teaching classes in copyright and intellectual property protection, music licensing, publishing and supervision for film and TV, film production, script writing, film scoring and record company administration.

Divisions:

Conservatory Academics

Fields of Expertise:

Music Copyright Law
Music Publishing and Licensing
Film Production
Film Scoring
Record Company Administration