Artist Uncovered: Sing4DLaughter
Welcome to the first ever edition of Artist Uncovered, the series where I, Lofi Cody, seek to uncover the deep lore behind the worlds greatest instrumental, lofi, and downtempo producers.
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Sing4DLaughter (real name Thiago – not the famous footballer) is the Brazilian musician and producer behind your favourite Final Fantasy lofi beats. He’s also a certified guitar wizard and a talented composer. I’ve had the privilege of working with Sing4DLaughter on a number of projects recently and took the opportunity to ask him some questions to get to know the man behind the myth.
Q: What’s the story behind the name Sing4DLaughter?
Sing: Short story, it’s from the lyrics of Aerosmith’s Dream On. “Sing with me, sing for the years sing for the laughter and sing for the tears”
Q: How did you first get into making music?
Sing: I’m from 1985, and my first contact with a DAW was in 2000 with a PS1 game called MTV Music Generator. I remember renting it at Blockbuster and spending afternoons just making music with that. A little after that, I started getting into Grunge music and learned to play the guitar and drums. Since then on, I’ve always had a band to play covers of bands like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. I was later introduced to TOOL and from that have become addicted to a more “progressive” kind of music.
In this journey with all of those bands, one consistent thing I’ve always had was the joy of recording stuff, mixing it in a DAW, and creating original stuff. We know how life goes, and I hadn’t had the opportunity to pursue any music-related career. But, I always had my bands and my projects in DAWS – which was the thing I loved the most. In time, due to life circumstances, I decided to quit my day job in banking and moved to Italy in 2015 to marry an Italian woman I fell in love with while walking the Santiago’s Pilgrimage in Spain.
Q: What inspired you to start doing video game covers / remixes?
Sing: In my mind, I had this plan in which when I retire I would dedicate all my free time to make something with music. But since I had to quit my job to come to Italy, I’ve seen this as an opportunity to chase this dream now, and with the support of my lovely wife decided to try to work with music somehow. I started giving guitar lessons while trying something music related on YT. After some time of making music covers of my beloved grunge songs and not becoming a famous YouTuber in six months, I was introduced to Lofi Girl by a guitar student. I was mesmerized by how much freedom for creativity this style offers and I thought, what an amazing idea would it be to make this lofi stuff with music from FF7 – which is my favourite video game ever and has the best music ever recorded, in my opinion.
I use to play some of FF7 songs on the guitar back in the day so I thought this could be great. I had recorded like 5 songs and put them on YT with this new channel called Sing4DLaughter and left it there. As I continued to give guitar lessons, I suddenly started seeing one of the tracks getting lots of views and the sub count on my channel growing, so I decided to put more effort and make more music and started seeing how hard it would be to keep this thing up and running with all the competition and this crazy and random YT algorithm.
After trying for almost a full year and not having anything close to a success (monetarily speaking) I was ready to quit and take a conventional job again. Then I received the YT email for monetizing my channel, and I decided (always with the support of my wife) to say no to that job and yes to VGM lofi beats full-time. A couple of years later, I’m finally managing to see some results monetary speaking and every Monday I’m the happiest man on earth just to be able to open my DAW
Q: What’s your favourite game franchise to cover music from?
Sing: Of course the answer is Final Fantasy, lol. Nobuo Uematsu = god to me. Also love to work on Pokémon, the arrangements are so beautiful and crazy sometimes that it sparks lots of inspiration on me.
Q: Do you have any specific goals for Sing4DLaugher?
Sing: My life goal with Sing4D is to have the biggest FF lofi music catalogue out there. I have this 24/7 Youtube live stream that I call Final Fantasy Lofi Radio on which hundreds of people connect every day and I have already 5 hours of FF music there. I will probably have this multiplied by 3 when I finish this project over the next 2-3 years.
Q: Do you have any goals for music in general outside of your Sing4DL project?
Sing: The most important thing to me is to be working with music, no matter the project. In 2025, I’ll be working on composing and recording the OST for an RPG indie game, and I’m super excited about it. Hope that this is just the first of many projects like this.
Q: Are there any projects you have coming up this year that you’d like to tell us about?
Sing: The projects I’m certain of working on for now are:
Final Fantasy: – FF8 lofi (15 tracks)
FF7 lofi (Og, Remake, Rebirth, with songs I haven’t covered yet: 10-15 tracks)
FF6 lofi (10-15 tracks)
My Pokemon towns project (working on all towns from all regions from the newest to the oldest with Sad Gatomon) currently working on Alola Region, already have covered Paldea and Galar Region
Chrono Trigger EP or Album
Mario Galaxy EP with Mellow Yoyo