RAIDIO TONY – Tony Cupolo
By: Lori Smerilson Carson
With all the different types of music in the world, Guitarist/ Electrical Engineer Tony Cupolo finds a natural progression to create, house and build on his music. Leaning into modern day advancements combined with his past musical experiences, he utilizes his incredible talents right here in North Florida to make memorable music.
Having the chance to chat with him about his music, he revealed some details on how it comes about, his past musical adventures, and what people can look forward to.
SFL Music Magazine: You have a new album coming out R2025B which is a live acoustic from R2024B studio tracks. What inspired that?
Tony Cupolo: That’s a great question. Really, I’m an AI recording artist. I’ll start off with that. That’s what the 2024 tracks both A and B are, AI. They are split between studio tracks with AI methods, but mostly I’m probably 90% AI, 10% real. I thought to myself, what about doing something live, actually performing the music live. So, you have to go into the whole new format, and I just like the acoustic format live. So, I wondered to myself, what are these songs in an acoustic format going to sound like for live settings? So, I put that together. The idea was to get people, if that day ever comes, to give people an idea of what the live performance would sound like. That’s how I play the songs live. I wouldn’t play the songs live in the studio version which is the previous tracks.
SFL Music Magazine: So that was basically for people to hear the live version?
Cupolo: So, in other words, when they come to a live show I want to set an expectation. I wouldn’t play them like the AI version. I play them the acoustic, and you can hear all the acoustic instrumentation. Everything’s very clear. It’s very straight forward to play that version of the songs live.
SFL Music Magazine: “Life In A Southern Town” the live mix has that bluesy rock acoustic sound. On “The Summer of 84” is that you singing?
Cupolo: AI vocals. Short answer to that. I write the songs and I use AI. I bring the melodies and the chord progressions to it, and I use AI to play it. I use AI like a virtual band. I got into it because of a friend about three years ago after not having played for like thirty years.
SFL Music Magazine: Your friend Jay who used AI tools for his music after he had a stroke?
Cupolo: Correct. He and I were guitarists back in the 80s. We probably played together for fifteen, twenty years on and off but a long time, and then life went different ways. Then he reached out to me kind of out of the blue, and the first six months almost a year, like an old friend does, “we’re putting the band back together” after all that time. I’m like, I don’t even have an instrument. He said, “well let’s just start.” So, I went off and got an instrument, my guitar and some microphones, and we started working on songs together again. Just like it was. For about the first year it was all actual instruments. We would exchange recordings over email. Then one day he dropped an amazing guitar track just like the old days. I said, Jay, this is a great track! I mean, I’m blown away by it! And he had used AI to make it. We’ve got to do something with this. He said, “yeah. It’s AI. You’re going to have to get the AI software to keep going.” What is AI? That’s how I got into it.
SFL Music Magazine: People sometimes abuse AI as you know, so what would you want them to know about how AI can be beneficial and helpful?
Cupolo: I think it opens up the recording process in a meaningful way to any independent artist which is what I was, right? So, I had initially started when he reached out to start putting together the independent artist studio, the microphones, the guitars, the drums. We were just kind of accompanying together. You don’t need to do that with AI. That comes when you want to perform. When you want to perform your songs for live audiences, yeah, you need the accompaniment, you need the instruments. But when you’re just making the music, you don’t really need that anymore. And it’s not a cheat. People don’t understand that. In the music making process for decades, it’s all about how they take a certain vocal part or a certain guitar part, and they might do ten, twenty, thirty takes on it before it’s right. They have the tape and they do it over. It’s the same thing with anybody that uses it correctly, you do takes. You generate it again. You change it, you edit it. Some of the songs that you’ve listened to like “Life In A Southern Town” that’s probably twenty-five, thirty takes deep before I got it to that point. The difference is I could work on that on my computer at two am on a Tuesday morning because that’s when the new idea for the new part came to me and I don’t have to call Jay or whoever I want to be working with and say, come on over, let’s do this now. The ability to capture those ideas and put them into a recorded form is now readily available. I came from the old world and I’m in the new world now. I’m very excited about it. You can also do things like once you have a track that you like for example “Life In A Southern Town”, I can change it to have more of a classical guitar sound and see how that works for the song without having to have a fleet of fifty guitars at my disposal to rerecord all those pieces on a different guitar. So, it opens up the creative possibilities a lot more and that’s what I found very satisfying about the process too.
SFL Music Magazine: Per your bio you started with classical piano in kindergarten, then choir and trumpet, then guitar. What drew you to music? What was your inspiration?
Cupolo: (He laughed) My sister (Monique Cupolo) will back me up on this. Our mom forced it on us. My sister was right there on the piano. The trumpet was, I was in school and I had to pick an instrument, they made us do band, so I picked trumpet. The choir was my mom because she was a strong woman, so I had to sing in choir. It was all triggered by my mom. All the artists stuff in my life was triggered by my mom in those early years. At the time I did not appreciate it, the foundation she was setting for us, but all these years later it’s like, I learned to read music, I learned about music theory, in all these different ways. She gave me a gift, and she gave my sister a gift too. I don’t think my sister ever really stuck with it. My sister is more of a visual artist. I was more of the musical side so yeah, it was just all driven by our mom.
SFL Music Magazine: Then you ended up meeting your friend Jason Stafford, right?
Cupolo: We grew up in West Virginia in our earliest years and we moved to Florida. For me it was the end of elementary, for her it was the beginning of junior high. So, there was four of us when we moved back in those days when everyone had the big families, and we had a basement of course because up north there’s basements, but in the south, in Florida, you don’t have any basements. So, all the sudden, all this musical stuff came to a stop because they didn’t want to hear four kids playing instruments all day long around the house. So, I made a new friend, Jay. One of the first people I met down here. He was into guitar, so I started playing with him, just playing his guitar, and like a year later, asked mom to get me a guitar. They agreed to it because by the time we were in the first or second year of junior high, Jay had a music room that had amazing equipment that Eddie Van Halen would play with, but I had, it was called The Rock then, and it was a little black box that you plugged your guitar into and it had a set of headphones that came out and that was it. The whole sound was right in that little black box. So, I got to play guitar, and practice and sound like the rock records of the time without having a 500-watt amplifier in my house. That’s what allowed me to get the guitar. I’d go over to Jay’s house because that’s where we could actually crank the volume up and hear ourselves. He lived on the river, and so we would just direct the speakers out over the river and just blast the music over the river (he laughed).
SFL Music Magazine: You just spoke about live performances. Are you working toward playing live?
Cupolo: Yeah. That would be my goal. I think my goal would be to put a band together that can play the songs live that people actually know. I want to play for an audience that knows it, so I’m in an audience building phase.
SFL Music Magazine: You mentioned 80s rock and 90s pop. Would you say that’s your favorite genre?
Cupolo: Oh yeah. That’s what Jay and I played for all those years, 80s and 90s. Both rock and pop. A little bit of country. So, what happened to me was after we rolled into the 00s, I was pretty much full-time working in a career. You never stop listening to music, but I think I stopped listening to music, so I kind of missed the 00’s chance for music. I just kind of did. I just had these 80s and 90s songs which is my background music that I played with, so I never picked up influences beyond the 90s is how I’m trying to describe that. So, when I started making music it just came out sounding like the 80s and 90s, and everybody that heard it would tell me, “oh, that’s an 80s and 90s retro sound.” I’m like, it’s not really retro. I made it yesterday, but it sounds like I made it in the 80s and 90s (he laughed).
SFL Music Magazine: What do you want people to take away from your music?
Cupolo: AI just keeps getting better. It’s gotten amazingly better since I started this. One of the things I’m trying to showcase is that it really is an amazing tool. Right now, I’m pro AI. I know there’s a lot of animosity towards it for a good reason on the financial side. I’m not fighting the financial battle. I’m not trying to make any money. I don’t need to make money on music. It’s just a thing I do, but I am trying to show people it’s just another tool. We’ve been using amplifiers, guitar effects, multi tracking and drum loops. All of these tools for decades. That’s a fact. Some of my favorite songs now are heavily processed songs. Like Boston. I love Boston. They spent years in the studio for a reason. This is just the latest generation of tools. Music can be made more efficiently, and the other thing it allows you to do, and I think is really cool as a music maker is, it allows you to explore multiple genres. Like I’ve got some classic rock and pop. I’ve got some reggae rock (“Reggae Rhythm”) and I’ve got some country rock. A lot of bands sound the way they sound because once four or five people get together and really get into a groove, a certain sound emerges and that’s that band’s sound. Well, if you want to go explore some other genre, you kind of got to leave the band and go do it with somebody else, but with an AI, you don’t have to do that. You can very easily explore another genre on the same record. So, that’s to me a very interesting thing about AI, the possibilities creatively in many ways.
SFL Music Magazine: Who does the artwork?
Cupolo: That’s more AI. I do the artwork, but I use AI to do it. I’m making this kind of an AI journey on both sides.
SFL Music Magazine: People can go to your raidiotony.bandcamp.com and soundcloud.com/raidiotony to get your music?
Cupolo: Yeah, my main three sites right now are Bandcamp, SoundCloud and Spotify.
SFL Music Magazine: Was there anything else you want people to know about your music?
Cupolo: I’ve got some new stuff. I’m always going to be working on some new stuff but really this year, I’m working on remastering. I’m going to be remastering a lot of the tracks. Songs aren’t going to change; they’re just going to sound better. I’m using some new mastering tools that have come out. So, that’s what I’m planning to do this year. I won’t even announce it. One of the cool things outside of the AI stuff is with these streaming platforms you can kind of update your songs and they just sound better. One day they sounded this way and then you remastered them and re-engineered it and it sounds better. You put it out on the same site and the next day the person hears it, it’s just a better sounding version of that song. So, that’s what I’m doing this year. I’m just kind of slowly remastering them, the 2024 and 2025 stuff. Maybe next year, 2027, I might do some new stuff.
SFL Music Magazine: Something for people to look for. Anything else to add?
Cupolo: I’m an electrical engineer for 36 years. AI, I use at work for my engineering, so it’s kind of a natural fit for me. Using it to do the things I’m doing with it in music comes very easily or naturally to me. So, I’m not just coming in from the cold, oh, where’s this been all my life? I just jump right in and know how to do it.
