Andre Ramone

Biography

I’ve been making stuff for as long as I can remember.

I started rapping and writing at ten with my cousin. We called ourselves the Brothers of Positivity. At twelve, I ran out of instrumentals to rap over, so I started making “pause tape” beats and recording myself with a karaoke machine. It was extremely low-tech.

Music wasn’t the only thing, though.

My mom introduced me to I Love Lucy when I was little, and I was hooked. Lucille Ball’s physical comedy had a huge influence on me. So did John Ritter. Then In Living Color came along and quite literally changed my life. I already loved hip-hop, but here was this whole other world of comedy that felt like it belonged to me too. Jim Carrey, Keenen Ivory Wayans, David Alan Grier, Tommy Davidson, Jamie Foxx. Later, Martin Lawrence. I studied these people without realizing I was studying them.

My family was funny too. We did live skits at Christmas and other family gatherings when I was a kid. By the mid-to-late ’90s, we were putting them on video. My aunts, cousins, brother and I would come up with ideas and rope each other into whatever ridiculous thing we were doing. Eventually my high school girlfriend got pulled into them too. Her name was Sarah. She’s my wife now.

I was in drama throughout school and performed in plays at church. At Aliso Niguel High School, I took video production and made skits, commercials and intros for our school’s morning show, The Morning Howl. I loved all of it.

But music became the thing I pursued.

Around nineteen, I discovered computer-based music production. First Sonic Foundry ACID, then FL Studio. FL Studio actually annoyed me at first. I hated the sounds. Then I realized I could bring in my own sounds, and suddenly I could hear the things I’d been trying to make since those pause-tape days.

I started rapping and performing with the homies as OC Uprise, doing shows and ciphers around Orange County. Eventually everybody went their separate ways. I kept making music.

Over time, producing became my primary lane. I signed publishing deals, landed placements on HBO’s Silicon Valley and MTV’s The Money and the Power, and kept building a catalog.

Then life got very adult.

Marriage. Kids. Work. Long commutes. Really long commutes.

After my son was born in 2016, I was driving 62 miles each way to work. At some point I decided maybe it was time to hang all this creative stuff up. Be responsible. Get serious.

I was miserable.

What I learned was that creating isn’t something I do when I have nothing better to do. I need it. So after the commute, after family time, after the baby was asleep and everybody else had gone to bed, I started making music again.

That became Moonlighting, an instrumental album I released in 2017. I was moonlighting as myself.

I decided I wouldn’t put that part of me away again.

In 2018, comedy found its way back too.

I was leaving my job in Irvine for the last time. I had received orders to go active duty, my family was moving from California to San Antonio, and an entire chapter of my life was ending. So naturally, I made a skit.

The premise was that chaos had broken out behind me as I was leaving work, and every instinct said I should turn around and see what was happening. But this was my last day.

Nope.

Keep walking.

That was the beginning of me putting silly videos on the internet. I’d make them here and there over the next several years, but life stayed busy. Active duty. Family. School. Figuring out what came after the military. Creativity was there, but I still kept these parts of myself in separate boxes.

Music over here. Comedy over there. Work somewhere else. Design when I had time.

Eventually I realized the boxes were the problem.

In 2026, I decided to take creating online seriously. Funny enough, the thing that pushed me there was realizing what I didn’t want to do. I had built a music production app and thought I should make videos talking about it. I made one.

I hated it.

I didn’t want to sit in front of a camera talking about software. If I was going to make videos, I wanted to have fun. I wanted to make people laugh. Tell stories. Talk about music. Talk about culture. Share some of the takes I’d normally spend twenty minutes explaining to my wife. Sometimes say something serious. Sometimes say something completely ridiculous.

So that’s what I started doing.

The music never went anywhere. Neither did the kid who loved Lucy and John Ritter. Or the teenager making sketches with his family. Or the guy making beats late at night when everyone else was asleep. I still love visual design, so now I make apparel too. I’ve always been drawn to new technology, from pause tapes to digital production to AI, especially when it gives me another way to turn an idea into something real.

My faith runs through all of it. I’m a Christian. Jesus is my Savior, and I believe the most important things I’ll ever do are for Him. I don’t really separate that into some other version of myself. It’s simply part of who I am, so naturally it shows up in what I create.

Where I grew up shaped me too. In Orange County, I moved between worlds, from Black church to Southern California suburbia to the heavily Mexican-American community I knew growing up in Anaheim. Now I’m based in San Antonio, a city that somehow felt familiar when I got here. All of those places, cultures and experiences shaped my humor and the way I see things.

For a long time, I thought growing up meant I had to narrow myself down. Pick something. Be serious. Stop trying to do everything.

Turns out, I had it backwards.

I’m a creative. That’s the through line.

Music. Comedy. Videos. Commentary. Design. Apparel. Whatever comes next.

At this point in my life, I’m not particularly worried about whether somebody thinks it’s cringe, whether every idea works, or whether somebody I haven’t talked to in twenty years is lurking on my page wondering what I’m doing.

I’m creating.

That’s what I’ve always done.

I just finally stopped trying not to.