Exposed Vocals Interviews “Room On The 3rd Floor”
“Room On The 3rd Floor” is a young pop-punk band composed by two brothers, Alex (21) and Andy (16) from Italy.
They’ve always loved music since they were little kids; Alex began taking guitar lessons at the age of 10, but he stopped playing it for some years until he began teaching himself, taking the instrument seriously. But, his real passion is playing the bass. He defines himself a bassist.
Andy is a multi-instrumentalist; he started taking piano lessons at the age of 9 but he’ve found his real passion on drums one year ago. He’s a crazy drummer and he can play it in an amazing way even if he’ve never took some drums lessons. It’s all by ears. He can also play acoustic guitar, electric guitar and bass.
Both the guys sing in their songs. Both write their lyrics and music.
They enjoy different genres of music but their passion is pop-punk. Their major influences includes Simple Plan, Good Charlotte, Green Day, All Time Low, McBusted, Blink 182…
They haven’t had the opportunity to perfom in some venues yet, as their searching for other band’s members. Indeed, in their songs, they divide each others their parts: Andy plays the electric guitar, drums and piano while Alex, the bass and acoustic guitars.
From the very beginning, they’ve only worked as a “cover band” of their favourites artists, but, after one year, they decide to do something new, something that they could define “theirselves”. So, on June 1st 2015, they’ve worked to their first attempt to write some original tunes and they’ve come up with their first demo ever, “Like My Fave Bands”. Their desire to write some songs was really high so, after one year working on them, they have now 12 songs, ready to be released this summer! On June 1st 2016, they’ve officially announced their band “Room On The 3rd Floor”, they’ve opened their YouTube channel and the band’s official accounts on social media.
Their first, and upcoming, album is called “Stop Dreaming, Start Playing”!
“Room On The 3rd Floor” on social media:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Room-
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ROT3rdF
Exposed Vocals: So tell us your story. Where did you grow up? What made you decide to become an artist?
Room On The 3rd Floor: Hi! We’re two brothers from Rome who loves pop-punk genre since we were little kids. It’s a bit difficult for us, because this kind of music isn’t really popular in our country… But, we’ve never betrayed our musical roots. In fact, as our first song says, we’ve always wanted to become like our favourite bands (for example Simple Plan, Good Charlotte, Green Day and others..). By listening to their songs and by watching their shows throught the years, we’ve understood that we want do this in our life, we want to play music.
Exposed Vocals: How did you come up with that name? What was your inspiration behind it?
Room On The 3rd Floor: In our “first period” as a cover band, we haven’t found our band name…to be honest we’ve never thought about some names for our band. But, when we’ve found out that we wanted something more for us, we’ve started to think about like “Hey, now we really need a name for the band!”. And the name has arrived instantly…we’ve immediately found out what could have been representative for us! All the music we’ve discovered, we’ve loved, we’ve sung (and now created by us!) was always located in our room. Everything is here. Everytime we enter in our room we can see what’ve made us. So, the inspiration behind our name, comes from the first band we’ve ever covered, McFly. As their band is born in a hotel room on the 3rd floor, also our band is born in our bedroom on the 3rd floor! McFly’s song, and their first album, is called “Room On The Third Floor” so: which name could have been better for us?
Exposed Vocals: What do you think about online music sharing? Do you ever give your music away for free? Why?
Room On The 3rd Floor: Today, there’re many online music platforms, from the most famous to the ones that helps emerging artists and this is really cool. For sure, we’ll support free releases of our music, because we’re really “new” in the music industry. We don’t expect to sell our songs now.
Exposed Vocals: Since everyone was a start-up once, can you give any smaller or local bands or artists looking to get gigs and airplay some tips?
Room On The 3rd Floor: We could say everything, but considering ourselves a “start-up band” too…We’re at the very beginning so, it’s like, we’re talking to any local or smaller bands but also to ourselves directly. If you wanna do this in your life, be motivated, work really hard, don’t wait for “the music world” knocking at your door but you should looking for it, do little gigs, do promotion, practice a lot, don’t give up when everything seems difficult but put in it all you got inside! Every artists had had a beginning in the music industry so, think this, as they’re there now, releasing albums, doing big shows and tour and other stuff, one day you may do all of these things!
Exposed Vocals: Where do you usually gather songwriting inspiration? What is your usual songwriting process?
Room On The 3rd Floor: Both write our songs. Sometimes we wrote together, sometimes only one of us come up with a song. It depends on what we want to write…it could be a personal lyrics or something. And then, there’re some songs that we think it could be easier to write together. During the songwriting process, there’re only us and the acoustic guitar, no other instruments. Then, when we have the song, we build the structure of the other instruments (like drums, bass and piano) around it and that moment it’s pretty cool.
Room On The 3rd Floor: Actually we don’t have a band website. We’ve officially opened our band accounts on social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and our YouTube Channel. Everything is really new cause we’ve opened them at the beginning of June. We haven’t released our music online yet, but when everything will be ready we’ll share our songs on YouTube (here’s the link of our channelhttps://www.youtube.com/
channel/ UCPMbRSgcQlvpGGq2q27fZoQ) and on SoundCloud, where we don’t have our official page yet. We’ll try to promote our album also on the big digital music services like iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, but in that case it’s a little bit more difficult…!
Exposed Vocals: If you were given half a million dollars and a year off, what would you do? How would you spend it?
Room On The 3rd Floor: I’m sure that we would buy many instruments and musical equipment first! Then we would probably use them for a trip to California and spend much time there for us and our music, I mean, we would have a really cool inspiration for our songs there…I think! Such an amazing place that we love… And then, we would like to give the remaining to charity!
Exposed Vocals: How do you find ways to promote your music? What works best for you?
Room On The 3rd Floor: Internet and social media help a lot the artists with the promotion of their music nowadays. There’re many platforms that you could use to promote your music globally, YouTube is an example… We will upload our songs there first and, on YouTube, everyone could search for them and listen to them for free and without any difficulties, it’s pretty easy. But YouTube couldn’t be enough, so we’ll try many ways to promote our music with the help of the digital music services. In this moment we’re studying and searching what we could do when our songs will be released, so our music could be arrive to many people…we’ll see!
Exposed Vocals: So, what’s next? Any new upcoming projects that you want to talk about?
Room On The 3rd Floor: For sure! We have our first debut album that will be released in July! We’ve worked on that project for a year and now we really can’t wait to share it online and see the reactions! It will also help us to grow as a band, maybe some people that don’t know us yet, will like it! It’s exciting. Finally we can say we’re in the game and we’re super ready to play! It’s funny the concept that we have of our album, cause every single song was recorded in our “home studio”, in our room and not in a real recording studio. So, basically our songs could be defined as some “demo versions?”. Maybe, but at the same time, we don’t only see our songs in this way, for us it’s a real album, it’s our first record, everything was made by ourselves…the music, the lyrics, the recording process, the mixing. Everything. We’ve worked really hard and we’ve put our heart and soul in this album. I think that one day we’ll enter on a real recording studio but now we’re proud of our work and I hope the people will understand it and will appreciate this, and most important, our music! We have 12 songs on the album and it’s called “Stop Dreaming, Start Playing”. The title perfectly sums up what we are and what we want in this moment for our band.
Exposed Vocals: If you weren’t making music, what would you be doing?
Room On The 3rd Floor: Difficult question…! We live for music and this is want we want to do in our life. When we see our favourite bands playing their shows we always say to ourselves: “Wow, there’s nothing else I’d rather do in my life…”. And this is cool because we actually put this lyrics in our first track ever “Like My Fave Bands”! Anyway, if we won’t make it as a band, I think that I (Alex) would try to search some jobs related to music for sure, like music critic or something…Music is my passion so I’ll try do to anything I can to make it in this “world”. Andy would like to study sound engineering to become a producer.
Room On The 3rd Floor: We try our best because it’s not so easy. We would love to play music, to write songs and working on these stuff like 24/7 but we know that we can’t. We know we have our responsibilities, as I’m (Alex) almost at the end of my university career and Andy is still studying at high school… during some periods we’re able to do many things for our music and then there’re other periods in which we can’t do barely nothing… but, to be honest we also know that we’re responsible guys, so juggling our music life with the rest of our normal activities isn’t a big problem for us!
Exposed Vocals: What should fans look forward to in 2016?
Room On The 3rd Floor: We’ll try to increase our audience first and then, the people who follow us, and will follow us, will have our album and we’re so excited about it, could expect many cover by us, many videos…in the next months we’ll see the reactions to our new songs, we’ll try to send our material to some record labels and then, who knows what’s going to happen…! One thing is for sure, we’ll never stop doing what we love!
Thank you for having us!