Dawson Keally is a senior at Fossil Ridge High School, balancing the crazy life of a student and upcoming electronic music producer. He currently lives with his parents and has an older brother, who is attending CU down in Boulder, CO. Keally has been continuously growing in the E.D.M scene in Fort Collins; with gaining more followers on social media and performing at the local venue Hodis’ Half Note in Old Town a couple times, Keally is excited to see what is in store next! 

Keally developed a passion for music at a very young age, always being that kid messing around with instruments and banging on a toy set of drums. At the age of five, Keally started taking lessons to play the Piano. Always looking to create something new and unique, Keally would always start making up random songs and melodies during his lessons. His teacher always would love to listen to him play his own pieces that she started his own club. Where other kids also taking piano lessons could all come and play pieces they have been practicing, have made themselves, or just to mess around and learn something new with each other.

Coming into high school, Keally was excited to be apart of the performing arts offered at the school like Band and Orchestra and to be able to expand his knowledge of music composition and note reading in classes. Keally his sophomore year joined to be a percussionist for the schools’ Wind Symphony. He wanted to be a percussionist because you get to play a wide range of  instruments which usually changes between each piece of music. “You have to learn how to play a lot of different instruments and pieces of music which can get tough but I like how you get to learn a lot more about each instrument then just focusing on on one the whole time.”

Also, Keally is the Lead Conductor and the captain Drum Major for the Marching Band at the school. He auditioned his Freshman year and was surprised to get part as there are only three spots. He has been a part of Marching Band all four years and has been the lead conductor for his junior and senior years. Being a conductor, he was super nervous in the beginning. Gathering up enough confidence to stand up in front of the audience and lead a band was hard as a Freshman but with time and lots of practice, now he gets excited to perform and feel at home when he is on stage leading his fellow band mates through a piece of music. 

At Fossil, Keally kept his schedule simple as he is involved in a lot of extracurricular activities. He has two off periods which he usually will spend doing homework and studying for other classes. He is mainly only taking elective classes since he completed most of his main core class credits to graduate junior year. Band practice takes up a lot of his time around school so using the time in between classes to study has helped Keally stay organized and get good grades in his classes. Making sure he finishes with the year strong, Keally is determined to stay ahead.

Keally started producing E.D.M music when he was twelve years old. Growing up, his older brother was the main influencer on Keally and who he looked up to the most in the beginning. Learning the basics and how to work the software, Keally started doing his own thing late his ninth grade year. Falling in love with producing music, he was determined to make this a full time passion and career in the future. Spending countless hours each day producing and learning new techniques, he is never not at his computer.

Soon, he created a SoundCloud account under the name ‘Tesseract’ where he would be able to post his music pieces online for other people to listen too. Slowing growing and gains more followers on the platform, his dreams of being a music producer has started to become reality. He has performed at the local venue, Hodis’ Half Note, down in Old Town, Fort Collins two times in the past year but hopes to go back again soon. 

“Playing at Hodis’ Half Note, I had a really fun time and it was a great learning experience for myself with performing in front of a crowd; getting more comfortable with it. I never thought that after a show, I get people coming up to me saying, “Are you Tesseract?” in my day to day life and that has to be one of the best feeling in the world.”

Currently, Keally is mainly focused on marketing himself and creating his unique sound. With electronic music, it is very hard to create something unique where you are just using the same pre downloaded sounds under a music production application like Ableton or Logic that everyone else is using.

Keally gets inspiration from other artists’ music and random things that he will hear around town in his day to day life. Paying attention to the small things about the world and the sounds around us helps him create more unique pieces of music.

Leaving high school in May, Keally hoped to continue his education at Icon Collective in Los Angeles, California. Icon Collective is a music production school where they teach and introduce students to connections and people who can help jumpstart their careers. You have to apply to get into the school by sending in a sample of music you have made. Not really having a backup plan at the moment, he is putting a lot of time and effort into producing music to one day hopefully make it big.