We’re excited to share another exclusive interview with Andre Vasconcelos. He’s one of NYC’s top shelf guitarist and now founded his studio Ghidrah Music. His journey is brilliant and his skills in working both roles, are undeniably amazing.
Back in June of 2017, we featured an exclusive interview with the guitarist Andre Vasconcelos, where we talked about how we was shaking up New York with his music. Today, we’re going to talk about his thriving studio Ghidrah Music.
The word, love and appreciation for his talent and skills have spread through out New York, and certainly to other parts of the globe.
Since then, we’ve been to countless shows where he’s performed with his own band, RANN, and we’ve followed his steps when performing beside other great musicians.
It’s been an amazing journey to see Andre thrive from (still) being one of New York City’s top shelf guitarists to now additionally starting his new business, a music studio: Ghidrah Music.
Check out the inspiring interview below and learn more about Ghidrah Music:
1. After our 1st interview a while back, so much has happened, and we’re curious to have an update on what you’ve been up to in NYC.
I’m glad to be back here on this amazing platform of yours Fernanda! I meet lots of people on a regular basis and your platform has made a big name for itself. People constant refer to it and one can easily spot the success it’s been garnering! I’m happy for you both on a professional and on a personal level! Congrats!
Life has been very busy, challenging and productive on the creative world for me. Me and the RANN boys instituted a plan for 2020 “A Song a Month” and we’ve been at it since last December really. With 6 songs out now, a 7th to come on June 26th and a lot of added Spotify traction (we got placed in 2 editorial playlists and increased our fanbase to everywhere in the world, places like Stockholm, Lithuania, Korea are jamming to RANN now!) we’re happy to have made that plan as it proves itself quite the fun challenge. We’re excited to feed both our old and new fans more music every month!
I’ve also been performing a lot as a sideman with some really cool pop artists. Last year I was invited to perform at Zara Larrson’s (Massive Europop star) intimate set at Billboard and Buzzfeed, toured North America with EZI (opening for Top 40 artists MAX, Bryce Vine and Nina Nesbitt), played a bunch of festival dates in both the US and Europe and was supposed to be going on another North America run with Kat Cunning and Allie X before the whole world got shutdown over COVID. So life’s busy and chaotic as usual over here in my camp.
A lot of what I’ve been doing lately as well is more on the songwriting side of the art as well.
Me and my music house-mates of Ghidrah Music, are writing tons and tons of music for/with a bunch of different artists all over the world like Loren Allred, Marcus Paul James, Marta Galuszewska, Maria Mathea, Tom Martin, Cathy Richardson (from Jefferson Starship) and many more.
We’ve written theme songs for TV shows, movies, trailers, video games and many many more.
2. So, what is Ghidrah Music? What type of services are you offering and lastly, how are you guys distancing ourselves from others in the same industry?
Ghidrah Music is the production outfit of RANN. Composed by the same team as the indie rock band, Ghidrah is a Studio Team that meets over at the wonderful production room that we have at Studio G, in Williamsburg.
Our work is mostly dedicated to writing music and placing songs via sync licensing. We are partnered up with vocalists and writers from everywhere on the planet that are interested in doing the same thing. We write these songs, produce, mix and master them, then we send them out to the various pipelines. Finally, we have in the hopes to sell these licenses to tv shows, movies, video games and such.
Some songs that made their way into big productions are RANN’s “Childish Ways” that was featured in the mega movie “Tudo por um Pop Star” in Brasil and “Cellophane” also placed in a Brazilian blockbuster movie named “Entrando Numa Roubada”.
Other examples are MR VVOLF’s “Never Look Back” that got placed on the movie “All For Nikki” and a parody song we did in for Axe’s North American Campaign “Don’t Overthink It”.
We are currently working with at least 20 different artists trying to diversify and populate our song catalog for placement and we are truly excited about it.
As far as social distancing and pandemic rules go, our Studio got shut down when the Governor gave the order. We split our gear into 3, creating individual “home stations” for each of us and we tackled the work that could be done from home.
It was a challenging time but we adapted correctly and we made the best we could with what we had. This is truly a historic and defining time in all our lives and the main choice here is to not lose focus of what’s important, our health. Being responsible and considerate is paramount. So for now, we’re minimizing our in person sessions very close to 0%. And, we’ll loosen the grip on that restriction as the weeks of successful reopening go by.
3. How was this transition from being on stage, to going behind the scenes and starting Ghidrah Music?
Honestly, you can hardly say it’s been a transition. This is just the natural growth of both paths of my life that were always present. I’ve been on the road and on stage for a long time, but those activities typically happen later during the day.
The production and writing stuff is often occurring during morning of weekdays so, between these two roles you can imagine my schedule gets pretty hectic. A good example of how this works can be be illustrated by last December.
In the morning the Ghidrah boys and I finalized an instrumental cue that we sold the publishing off to NBC, for the show “Making It” with Nick Offerman and Amy Poehler. Right after that I had to get to a rehearsal, so I left the studio, did the rehearsal and made my way to the Bowery Ballroom, where we played a sold-out show with Pop Star songstress Kat Cunning.
Typically my days work like that, mornings and early evenings for Ghidrah, the rest of the evening and nights for side man or RANN live performances.
4. I’ve seen that in a super short time, you’ve worked with major brands in Brazil and other corners of the globe. Can you share a bit about some of these great projects?
Having discovered that what we truly wanted to do was also our strongest asset was incredibly lucky and fortunate.
We are a group of originally 3 producers. Our company was even called 3P, for 3 Productions. We did the entire debut record by the Brazilian artist Rachell Luz under that alias. We eventually decided to change the name to Ghidrah Music, to honor our ridiculous tendencies. With the name change also came a change of focus, we wanted to use our time and our talents to write music together instead of working as producers for artists. We still do that, but it isn’t the main focus of the company anymore.
What started happening was, the people that knew us as producers and now as songwriters started using us to write songs for their business campaigns. Sometimes it would be a big advertisement campaign, such as the Claro “Novo” campaign we did last year for South America’s biggest phone and internet company.
Sometimes it’d be for an intro for a podcast, or for Call of Duty professional e-sports team Twitter teaser trailer. The point being is that we took our one stop approach for audio solutions from before and we added something even more rare and hard to come across: the ability to write good songs.
That expanded the horizon for us and let us work with a ton of different companies and entities everywhere in the world.
5. A question, maybe hard to answer at this time, but with the global situation of Covid-19, have you been able to identify any new trend or opportunities in the music industry? How severely did the Pandemic affect the industry?
The pandemic has been extremely harsh to the music industry. With shows and events cancelled for the foreseeable future, a lot of my music professional peers are suffering greatly.
I know so many people that have been living exclusively on the road, whether they are side man like me, or road crew, lighting tech, tour managers, day-to-day managers, FoH engineers, etc. Every single one of these guys have had their futures cancelled for an undetermined amount of time. And, that is a very scary thought.
Hopefully the world will arrive at a solution for this horrible virus problem and we’ll be able to return to some form of normalcy soon. Personally, I’ve lost so many concerts, rehearsals and recordings, frankly too many to count.
From a main stage festival slot at Central Park to two mini tours in Mexico and Japan, to a RANN + Jefferson Starship throw down at the Westhampton Theatre, the losses are actually incalculable.
But, what isn’t is the fact that I am alive, well and healthy. We can always regain opportunities and earn back money lost, but we can’t always recover people from the damage caused by this brutal virus.
6. Do you have any upcoming projects that you can share with us? We’d love a sneak peek!
Too many upcoming projects!
We’re working on a songwriting competition with the awesome Marcus Paul James, that’ll be happening on Friday. We wrote a song together for it and we’re super excited to support our amazing friend belting his beautiful voice in favor of positive change.
We are also expecting to receive Cathy Richardson’s vocals on a song we wrote for a big feature film to be produced in Los Angeles once production re-opens.
And, last but not least, RANN is releasing our newest and most exciting song to date named “When I’m Lucky”. We are so thrilled to share the song with the world, we did an amazing quarantine collaboration video with Brad Wagner and it’ll reach all streaming platforms and Youtube on June 26th, so stay tuned for it!
Thank you, Andre, for this amazing and inspiring interview.
It’s been an amazing journey to see you thrive from (still) being one of New York City’s top shelf guitarists to now additionally starting your new business venture, your studio Ghidrah Music! It’s truly inspirational and amazing to see all you’ve achieved.
No doubt your career in New York City, and across the globe, only continues to skyrocket!
Good luck and keep up posted!
Photo Credits: Courtesy Andre Vasconcelos / Ghidrah and Pronoun
