This school year many independent musicians have joined the student body as freshmen.

A group of freshmen have formed a band together, consisting of Dan Booth (drums), Zach Nalick (guitar/vocals), Barrett Sako (lead guitar), and James Reuter (bass). Drummer Dan Booth was interviewed about his group:

Q: Do you make your own music, or do you just play other rock songs?

A: “A mix of both, we mostly play covers of songs, but we, we do have a few original songs, mostly joke songs for right now, but they’re starting to get more serious.”

Q: How long have you been doing your rock band?

A: “We’ve been together for a few months now, and we mostly just practice after school in the band room, and then also practice at various people’s houses on the weekends.”

Q: Why did you guys start the band?

A: “We’re all musicians, and we just kinda wanted to do something for fun and just started jamming in the band room together and it kinda turned into an official band at some point. And yeah we all just kinda enjoy music and play together.”

Q: Do you guys have a name for it or anything?

A: “We have a working band name, probably won’t stay, the band name, but we’re working on it.”

Q: Have you played for anybody and, if so, how did they receive it?

A: “We did play a gig in someone’s garage on Halloween, and everyone was super encouraging, and it was a super fun experience. Everyone’s super accepting of music. There’s no hecklers or anything like that.”

Q: Are you guys planning to expand at all or are you going to stick with rock for now?

A: “We’re mostly sticking with rock for now, but we’re trying to mix genres a little bit, maybe get a little bit more jazzy, some funk, stuff like that, just, mix genres some more.”

A more online focused music producer has also come to Granada this year: Zander Bruce (9). Bruce has recently achieved 1,000,000 streams (or listens) on Spotify under the name Cuileann, with his most popular song, “DECIMATION”, boasting 430,000 streams on the same platform. He mainly makes phonk and lo-fi music, but he “also [makes] metal music, jazz music, RnB music, DnB, and many other genres.”

Bruce was also interviewed about his music and the process:

Q: What kind of music do you make?

A: “I am best known for my phonk music, more specifically phonk house which is a sub genre of cowbell phonk which is furthermore a sub genre of phonk, and to be honest it’s a messy history. I suggest looking at the YouTube video by Yokai ‘how Spotify is killing phonk’ if you’re interested in the genre and its history.”

Q: Why did you start making music?

A: “I have always had a drive for music, it just took the Covid-19 pandemic to trigger a quarantine where I had nothing to do but practice music production all day, so I guess the real reason is because I had nothing to do and thought it was cool.”

Q: What do you like most about making music?

A: “The fact that it’s something nearly impossible to be interpreted as something objective. One person could find a song to be the most abhorrent, vile thing ever, while others may find it to be a masterpiece of their generation, and this basically means you can improve from many interpretations you may not have ever been able to consider without other’s input.”

Q: What are some struggles you face with music production?

A: “Inspiration and consistency is most definitely the biggest struggle for nearly all producers and really for any musician.”

Q: What goes into making a song?

A: “There are endless ways a song could be constructed. Most music is put together using a DAW [Digital Audio Workstation] like FL Studio, which is what me and many other songwriters use. Me personally, I like to start with a melody or some chords, and create drums around them, and finishing with bass and sfx. Although the writing of the music is only a portion of the whole process. A lot of mixing and mastering goes into it as well.”

“Mixing is basically getting rid of ugly sounds, making sounds louder or quieter, adding effects and so on. After the mixing and mastering of the song, cover art is needed to publish the song. After getting some form of cover art people typically upload their music to platforms like SoundCloud and YouTube, while some expand into Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora and so on. Although, actually getting music on Spotify and Apple Music often takes a lot of boring business processes that I won’t get into here simply because it’s not all that important.”

“Overall, the actual music making you do is a small percentage of work you realistically do on a musical project, and even then it is mostly processing rather than actually writing the piece.”

Q: Lastly, where can people find you?

A: “When it comes to my music itself, it is available under the name of Cuileann on all major streaming platforms, but when it comes to my social media, you can find me on Instagram as @ cuileann.beats.”