The origin of my music name, Funketone, pronounced “funk tone,” is a blend of my affection for funk music, particularly the James Brown style, and “Tone,” derived from my nickname, Tony, and its musical connotation. Originally, the “E” in Funke wasn’t silent; it replaced the letter “Y.” However, it later became silent when a rapper in a group I was making beats for used it and it stuck, so I kept the pronunciation.

For years, I only created instrumentals, and it was a fun creative outlet hobby. I imagined being a music producer in the music industry, but I didn’t want to deal with the hassle and the cutthroatness that I’ve read and heard about in the business, so I just kept it as a hobby for many years. So in 2021, I decide to make an album to release to the public. I learned that it was easier now to release music as an independent artist, but I’m not an artist, even though my art is producing or creating music compositions. Instead of making an instrumental album, I took on the task of really producing by having vocalists on my tracks and instructing them on what I want and need from them to perform on my tracks. I also thought I might get more listeners to maybe want to listen to my music instead of doing instrumentals, but I also wanted to hire real musicians to play real instruments on some of my tracks for the first time ever. This first album with lyrics, which is my weakness, is why I hired writers and lyricists to help me with my songs. I never cared for lyrics; even as I listen to other artists’ music, I hear the words, but I almost always focus on the production, the melodies, the arrangements, and the vocal tone of the singer singing the notes.

There was more to this than I thought. The challenges of hiring musicians and doing it exclusively online was crazy and fun. I might tell some of those stories in the future.
Now that it’s done, and it took almost four years to make this album, I’ve learned a lot. The journey of creating this album was so fulfilling as I enjoyed the process as much as the success of finishing it, maybe more.

I wrote my first song, called “Vera,” while walking to middle school at age 13. From age 11 to 13, I was recording sounds around the house with my mother’s tape recorder. I was banging on walls, furniture, or on anything I could to record with any objects that I could think of to use. My mother would yell, “BOY, TURN THAT NOISE DOWN!!!” She was also tired of me using her tape recorder, so for Christmas one year, she got me a boom box with a dual cassette player and a mini Casio keyboard. I was excited, and I was on my music-creating journey, all by myself. Over my young early years I’ve gotten slightly better equipment, mostly keyboards that had new sounds and a built-in track machine, but never the well-known keyboards. 

I never really took the time to learn everything about my keyboards, but just enough to create because I had a hard time turning my need to make music off. I got inspired by hearing a cool new sound, and I had to make a beat with it just right then. This may have hurt me not knowing about all the technical parts of music production equipment, but it did get me to focus on creating the music itself, and you can use any tool available to create music. I also never cared about sampling other artists’ songs; I always wanted to create music from scratch. Focusing on the composition and the arrangement, the equipment almost doesn’t matter.
My teen years were when I would use my synesthesia listening to songs on the radio. Studying some of the greatest producers of all time, like Teddy Riley, L.A. Reid & Babyface, Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, James Brown, and Gamble & Huff, just to name a few. I would read all the credits of every CD in the record store that was displayed on the back to see if my favorite producers were on it; even if they had just one song that they produced, I was buying it. I followed producers, not the performing artists. To me, a vocalist performing was just another instrument in that production.
My next music equipment upgrade came by accident, and it was my first DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), but at the time I didn’t realize that it basically was a DAW or even know what a DAW was, and it was just what I needed.
I was looking for a new game for my PlayStation console at the now-closed-down toy store Toys “R” Us. Walking down the video game aisle, looking at the 10×5 cards that showed the video games. You would flip the card up to see screenshots of the action and details about the game on the back. There was a music game that read “MTV Music Generator.” I flipped it up, and I was like, THIS IS WHAT I NEED! A game that lets you create original music? I was in. The physical games were not displayed in the aisle. You had to pull out a ticket from the pouch of the game that you wanted and then go to the checkout, buy the game, and an employee would go get the game for you. I went home and put it in my PlayStation and learned just enough about how to use it and was making beats, and I made a lot of them.

About five years later, I made beats for an underground rap group called City Life from Washington, DC. This was the first time I had a vocalist perform on my tracks. I asked a former co-worker if he knew anyone who sings or raps because I make beats, and he said his group does. The next day I gave him 16 beats, but my beats were not arranged for vocals; there were just instrumentals. About a week later he said they liked all of them but one, and I was shocked. So I told him that I could restructure the beats into the usual song structure format for vocals. He said no, we like them just the way they are, and I was shocked again. They wrote and created rap songs with hooks, sometimes with singing in the hooks around my beats’ instrumental structure. My music was different from anything they had heard before, and it challenged them creatively, and so I ended up replacing their in-house producer/beatmaker. I became gold to them and was treated like royalty because of my music. This blew my mind, as I was just enjoying making tracks for them and seeing what they do with them. I never got a big head about it, but did appreciate the love and respect that they gave me.

I never hung out with them outside of their studio sections. I wasn’t into what they were into, I just focused on making beats for them.
Nobody in the group knew that I was using a PlayStation game to create my beats using the “MTV Music Generator” and was recording on a blank CD from my TV onto a Philips CD burner machine from the early 2000s. They did ask me what I was using, and I said, “I can’t tell you that; some things I have to keep to myself. Even if I had told them, they would have had a hard time believing me because of the beats I was making with a game. The game was just the tool; those music creations were me. I was making music with this game for almost 12 years. My next upgrade was Logic Pro around 2011, and I still use it today.

I’ve created so much music throughout my life; I thought that this was the time to share it. I will upload some, if not all, of those old beats I made from my early years in the Special Content section.