We recently connected with Ruby Antolin and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Ruby, thanks for joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

I am fortunate to be working on several meaningful projects.

The first one is a new music project that I started this past fall called Happy Happy Song Machine. I had an idea at the start of 2023 of making a new pump up, high energy dance song, that celebrated each individual with their specific name blaring out of the speaker. While I was not 100% sold on the idea, the thought of it brewed throughout the year. I told a few of my siblings about it and a friend here and there. In October 2023, my girlfriend (who’s an elementary school teacher) reached out asking me to make a birthday song for her student that same day. This was the push I needed to get myself into gear and actually make the new happy birthday song. The stars may have been aligned or the creative juice must have been on overdrive because from start to finish, the track took me no more that 20 to 40 minutes to complete. I sent over the competed song with the students name on it. My girlfriend filmed the reaction of the class when she played it for the first time and seeing all the students reactions when the birthday students name was sung, was priceless. Since then, I’ve heard many similar stories about how my birthday song has brought a lot of joy to many people of all ages. Hearing these stories has brought me joy in bringing happiness to people on birthday. So far I have created 1155 different version of the birthday song, giving everyone a special song for their birthday.

The second meaningful project I’ve been working on stems from my creative endeavors, taking a turn into the tech world. I was introduced to the blockchain and NFT world in 2020 and learned about the tech behind the crypto currencies and their functions. Mulling over the idea of how the blockchain can benefit creatives, my long time friend and fellow creative Zorba Grashin and I came up with NF3 Studios. The idea behind it is to build a platform that gives audience members and fans more opportunities for engagement and influence, while giving artists and creators the technology that allows for better collaboration, monetization, and community. We’ve been working on the concept for a long time and recently completed our first build of the platform with plans to begin showcasing it in Q2 of 2024.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Music and the creative arts have been a part of my life since birth. Both of my parents are musicians with creativity and music being a large part of their life. Their love for adventure landed them in Tokyo, where they taught English for nine years starting when I was a year old. This gave me a unique experience being a third culture kid as I spent my formative years in Japan.

While they were musicians, they encouraged music and any creative field as a hobby rather than a career path, citing the challenges and hardships one endures in pursuit of a career in the creative field. While I heeded their warnings as a young adult, I found myself spending more and more of my free time on songwriting and producing.

In my early 20’s, I connected with Nissim Black and Yosef Brown who brought me on board to produce and song write for a contestant from the X-Factor. This led me to meeting Ricardo Rose (Sir Mix-A-Lot’s Manager) and Wael Abu-Zaki (the creative director at KUBE 93.3 FM and KISS 106.1 FM at the time). Together, they had a creative management firm called Zakirose. I began to intern there to better understand the music business. During this time, I reconnected with an old acquaintance, Lukas Untersteiner and we began writing electronic music together. We wrote one full song and two half songs, which I presented to Ricardo and Wael. They placed all three tracks into a sync licensing placement right away. Seeing that the electronic dance music project had tractions, Lukas and I formed Robot Jox, where we continued to make music for brands such as Xbox, Microsoft, Pepsi, American Family Home Insurance, and the Seattle Seahawks. As Robot Jox, Lukas and I worked with Matt Bekker, producing a song called Bonfire Dreams, that got us our first radio placement on Seattle’s C89.5 FM. We had our first charting song with Hashem Melech 2.0 with Gad Elbaz and Nissim Black. These successes, as well as being honored as a finalist in the John Lennon International Songwriting competition in 2016, led me to move to Los Angeles to see how I could make music into a career. Sadly, the move did not bear fruit like I imagined it would and the challenges my parents told me about came front and center.

Then my close friend Zorba Grashin connected me with his lawyer, Joe Anderson. Joe connected me with Universal Music Publishing, where I was given an opportunity to write background music for reality TV shows such as Keeping up with the Kardashians, The Challenge, Real World, Total Bellas, The Today Show.

The challenges I faced in the music industry after moving to Los Angeles and the rise of the blockchain, along with NFT’s gave birth to an idea of NF3 Studios with my close friend and collaborator, Zorba Grashin. Through both of our experiences with our challenges we faced within the entertainment industry and the possibilities allowed through blockchain technology, we began creating a platform that reimagined the entertainment industry, starting with animation. While producing music and songwriting remain my passion, a new passion of creating an infrastructure allowing creatives in all mediums an opportunity to have their work featured in a Hollywood level production without the red tapes, gate keepers, and predators found in the creative field, allowing merit and talent thrive one’s career has risen to the forefront.

As NF3 has become my main focus, I remain passionate on all my projects including, Rubicon, Robot Jox, The Frequency Bath, Happy Happy Song Machine, and collaborating with other artists and songwriters.

Aside from being a creative and teaching part time, I enjoy spending time with my girlfriend, seven siblings, visiting family in Seattle where I lived after Japan, and playing beach volleyball with friends.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

The goal for my music has been ever-changing and evolving. It started out as wanting to be a performer on stage, but that shifted as I began writing and producing more and more songs. I found that I enjoyed writing and producing songs over performing them in front of others. The process of creating something out of thin air and making something out of nothing is really special and exhilarating. While I’ve and will continue to produce and write in a variety of genres, the joy I’ve been seeing from the new custom birthday song project with Happy Happy Song Machine has inspired me to make music that is geared towards children. I’m planning on making educational content to help children master and remember math and English skills through song.

With NF3 Studios, the goal is to create a decentralized entertainment platform that connects creatives together, eliminates the additional steps that exist in the current system, allow stories to be told without studio interference, and to create a system that pays creatives more.

Can you share your view on NFTs? (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

NFT’s are interesting. When I first heard about them, I didn’t understand what they were, thinking that it was just digital art that people purchased and how it would be easy to copy the image. Why would someone want to get something that can easily be copied? Then I learned more about it through researching and friends who were deep into the blockchain world. While most NFT’s are not great and have only been created to jump on the trend, the ones that are good makes sense. The technology of a unique digital identifier that is impossible to replicate is inherently a fantastic idea. The challenge is how to use this in the right way. NFT’s are currently widely know for the use in digital art, but I think there will be a future where NFT’s will be used for all sorts of purposes.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gorubicon, www.instagram.com/happyhappysongmachine, www.instagram.com/thefrequencybath ,www.instagram.com/nf3studios
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRzjeEd8qNx_p5iStuhZWlg , https://www.youtube.com/@thefrequencybath
• Other: Happy Happy Song Machine Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6E9qceaxgzpMz5ecZfni6O?si=oGEBtkGxSWKfEXJaK3sv8Q The Frequency Bath Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2icbm0tCi8s7FdBRc6qveT?si=pkTzKhsDRceOKZ7oDZSC9Q

Image Credits
Max Haupt Photography www.maxhaupt.com www.instagram.com/maxhauptphoto