Johnny Rankovic

Johnny Rankovic (born in Belgrade in 2003.) is a guitar player, composer,
songwriter, music producer, founder and frontman of the band The Churlians
with which he played more than 50 concerts on large stages all around the
country (Exit 2017, Belgrade Beer Fest 2019, Special guest of 2Cellos 2018, Guitar
Art Festival 2018, Stadion Tasmajdan 2016…). He has been playing the guitar
intensively since he was 6 years old, wrote his first song at 7, started attending
music production classes at 9 and released his first album „Teram po svom“ as
the youngest complete author of a rock album on which he played all guitars
and vocals at 12. The album was produced by Vojislav Aralica.
He had notable success in The UK Songwriting Contest when his song „Hot or
Cold“ was chosen to enter the semifinals (top 20) among 70.000 songs from the
whole world. This success was confirmed two years later by the song and music
video „Strah“. In addition to the album mentioned above, Johnny has released
several singles: „Harley, Les Paul & Rock ’n’ Roll“, „Važno je samo šta ostaje“
which is also the first single of the homonymous album published by PGP RTS,
„Gospodin Crni Leptir“ and „We’re all the same“ which he produced entirely by
himself in his room during quarantine.
During the same period, he produced the song „Umorno lice“ by a young artist
from a remote area using nothing but a phone vocal demo as a reference. Apart
from the guitar, Johnny also plays the bass guitar, piano, keyboards, mandolin,
lap steel and ukulele.
He is also extremely active in charity work for which he was awarded The Hero
of Belgrade and Podviznik Novosti awards in 2013. On top of that, he was also
the person of the year 2013 and 2016 as well as Exit Youth Hero 2016.
He graduated from the Comtrade Infortmation Technology High School as an
electrical engineer of multimedia and now he is studying Music & Sound
Production at BIMM Institute (British & Irish Modern Music Institute) in London.
“I believe that as a young producer I ought to look towards the future, create and
embrace innovation as well as find ways to be unique, thereby I am particularly
interested in Immersive and interactive audio, creative recording and mixing
techniques, writing and production for multimedia applications (especially
motion picture and video game soundtrack production), AI composition and of
course, being an artist, producing songs is a great love of mine.”