I AM BRUFIO

My name is Brufio and I am a producer and singer/songwriter from Munich (Germany) who dedicates his life to music.

As a kid, I always loved to make music and when I finally took my mother's 30 year old guitar out of its dusty case and started to learn the first chords all by myself, I knew that I never ever want to let go of it.

In order to get my music out there, I had to record my songs and covers, and in order for them to sound good, I also had to learn the art of mixing and mastering. In the process of making music, writing songs, playing in bands and releasing music, I discovered my passion for the whole song-creation process. Starting with an idea and then listening to the final product, and people relating to it, crying to it or partying to it, is the most amazing feeling in the world.

Slowly all of my friends and friends of friends started to ask if I could also help them bring their songs to life. And so it began. What started with a financed laptop from my apprentice job became the studio you know and see every day on the internet.

Lots of people don't realize how different recording is from playing live. Making records is a snapshot of your life in musical form. Once it's pressed, that's it. You will remember it forever — where you were, how it felt. There's something so exhilarating about that to me and I live for it.

I would say I'm from the newer generation of producers. When I was a kid, all I had was my little Hifi system with a cassette and a microphone. In 2002 I already had my first computer, with Magix Musicmaker, and when I bought my first Macbook in 2009 and Garageband was on it for free, I was lost in the world of music.

But before any of that studio gear, there was a concert that changed everything. March 18, 2011 — Bruno Mars played a tiny club in Munich, maybe 300 to 500 people, and I was there six hours early to stand in the front row. That night I decided music wasn't just a hobby for me. I went home and learned every song he'd ever released. I still have him hanging on my studio walls today.

By 2012 I had my first real band. We called ourselves The Brufios — the name comes from the movie *Hook*. There's a character named Rufio, the leader of the Lost Boys, and my sister and I always misheard his name as "Brufio." We used to shout it all the time. So when it came to naming the band, it felt right — we were the boys who didn't want to grow up. That's also where my own name, Brufio, comes from. We played our first big show that May, open-air, in front of 3,500 people, with barely any stage experience between us. Danny Hoffman joined us on piano around that time. He's still my studio pianist today, and one of my closest friends.

The band broke up not long after. I took a loan from the bank, built my first real home studio, and recorded my first album, Rain. I even got to perform two songs on German national TV.

I also studied "Music Production" at Hofa College of Music. Being self-taught was good and it worked, even if it was hard — but I also wanted to take the professional path later in life, to prove to myself that I was ready, and to fill in the last gaps in what I knew.

In 2014 I found the house that's still my studio today. I built it up piece by piece, made plenty of expensive mistakes with gear I later sold again, and slowly figured out what I actually needed to make good records. I built a website, ran a few Google ads, and four weeks later I had my first paying client — an artist who traveled down from Berlin just to record with me in Munich.

Two years in, I missed performing too much to stay just the studio guy. So in 2016 I put a new band together, rented my own venue in Munich, and produced an entire headline show myself — called *A Night To Remember* — booking, marketing, tickets, all of it, on my own. I was terrified almost no one would show up. That night, the room was full.

I spent the two years after that on my second album, working closely with Phil, a multi-platinum German producer who taught me more than almost anyone else in this industry.

In 2018, my childhood friend Pietro Basile and I found our way back to making music together, picking up exactly where we'd left off as kids — the same two of us who wrote our very first song together back in 2002, still in school. In 2020, I rebranded the studio to what it's called today: Brufio Music. I rebuilt everything from scratch, and started making the channel in English, so the story could reach further than just Germany. Pietro and I are now finally taking our first real tour together in 2026.

Presenting artists and clients with a comfortable environment to make records and be creative, my team and I have a knack for making every artist around the world better, and helping their music become exceptional on record.

I'm still chasing the same goal I've had since I first discovered YouTube back in 2008: hitting 100K subscribers, and proving that a real living as a musician and producer is possible, especially once you take it online.