Student musicians create and release mix tape

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Sitting at a laptop, headphones on, senior Ant Chiofalo runs through words and rhythms in his head as he listens to different beats on Garageband.

“Music lets me express myself, let’s me get thoughts out,” he said. “I recorded my stuff to share it with other people. They can choose whether or not they want to listen.”

At the end of October, senior Ant Chiofalo, who goes by the artist name AC Breezy, along with senior Jake Zolda (YUNG ARSENAL) and Nick Moretti (Yung Flannel) are producing what they refer to as a “mixtape” on a music streaming site called Soundcloud. SoundCloud is a free music streaming site where users can create music and post it onto their profile, allowing others to follow them and “like” the tracks adding an online social aspect to creating music.

Chiofalo was the first to release their single “1 Train (Remix)” on Oct. 30th. Shortly after on Nov. 5th, Zolda released his “Pound Cake (Remix),” and Chiofalo released his new single “Eighteen.” These three tracks have a total of 3184 plays combined in the two weeks since they were posted.

Both were inspired by some funny posting from Soundcloud that were shared on Twitter. They said they took it from there, thinking it would be fun to do with their friends.

From there it turned into something more serious, stating that they wanted to make it seem more professional, unlike the ones they saw online already. To get this professional level of quality found in the tracks, the pair used software such as Garage Band and Audacity, and re-recorded the tracks Chiofalo said close to 50 times.

They sat down and typed lyrics out onto their phones and revised them, stating the two took inspiration from artists Mac Miller, Chris Webby, and Drake. They found a pre-existing track from Youtube and imported it to the recording software, modified the beat and went right into recording.The whole process took about 7-10 hours for one song.

The singles have been met with very polarized reception.

“I think some are really good and some need work,” said freshman Stephanie Pantalone, “but overall pretty chill.”

Like most other things, listeners took to Twitter or other online media to either share the links or to offer their criticism. For Chiofalo, the feedback provides him with a way to make it better.

“Some people said I was pretty monotone, so I plan on working on that,” he said. “I let most of the bad stuff shake off, but I like both the negative and the positive.”

Chiofalo said that in the next few months he plans on releasing a few more singles, but his main focus now is a collaboration with Jake Zolda, Nick Moretti, and himself. He also stated  that even though this started off as a fun hobby with his friends, he may start taking it seriously and see where it takes him.

Check out the singles now on Soundcloud: