♪ Opening theme music ♪
Hello, and welcome to this episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
My name is Diane Kolin.
This series presents artists, academics, and project leaders who dedicate their
time and energy to a better accessibility for people with disabilities in the arts.
You can find more of these conversations on our website artsably.com,
which is spelled A-R-T-S-A-B-L-Y dot com.
♪ Theme music ♪
Today, ArtsAbly is in conversation with Andre Louis, a musician from London, UK,
and an accessibility expert for features in digital audio workstations.
You can find the resources mentioned by Andre Louis during this episode
on ArtsAbly's website, in the blog section.
Welcome to this new episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
Today, I'm with Andre Louis, who is a musician from London, UK, and also
an accessibility expert for features in digital audio workstations.
We're going to talk about that, I guess.
I think your artist's name is Onj', right?
That's right.
Well, welcome, Onj', Andre.
It's nice to be here, by the way.
Nice to see you, too.
I will start this episode by asking you a bit about yourself, about your career,
and about when you started music and why you started music.
Okay, so I started playing music, apparently, when I was three years old,
and I was given a keyboard.
It was one of these monophonic single-note entities.
You couldn't do chords or anything, but it was what we had.
Apparently, the first thing I learned to play on it was a British TV theme,
which is called EastEnders.
If you don't live in the UK, you may never have heard of it.
It's not very exciting, but apparently, that's what I heard and learned to play.
Then I just carried on playing from that point forward.
I apparently did some piano lessons in school, but I don't remember anything about them.
For the majority of my life, I would consider myself
as a self-taught musician.
What style are you playing or what style did you play since?
Yeah, I've played a lot of different things, but mostly I work in the jazz
and soul and RnB and reggae genres.
Those are what I feel comfortable doing, and Neosoul and such.
Okay, great. From your early studies of music,
you also used a lot of different tools
to help you because if I read correctly
your biography, you're blind.
That's right. I am, yes.
So how did it work for you learning all these tools and
music techniques for you as a musician?
Well, looking back in the '90s, when I was in boarding school,
which I was for eight years, The first experience I had
with sequencing, which is the act of recording multiple
tracks into a MIDI file, it was then anyway,
was a Yamaha keyboard called the SQ-16.
The school had one, and my music teacher at the time saw that I wanted
to compose and do composition.
She, in her spare time, and I'm so grateful to her for doing that,
looked at the manual and then taught me the basics of using this keyboard blind.
Literally, no pun extended because that was the only way to do it.
I wrote a lot of stuff, just at the weekends, just some ideas,
and it was my first experience with this thing.
I had nothing like that at home, so I could only do this while I was in school,
but I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I have all of those, or nearly all of them, MIDI files
to this day from my '90s exploits.
I'd like to think I've improved since then, but you got to start
somewhere like baby pictures.
No one wants to see them, but you've got them anyway.
From then, I moved on to RNC in Hereford, Royal National College.
I went to Worcester from 1992 until 2000.
In 2000, I moved to Hereford, just down the road or up the road,
depending on which way you look at it.
I studied music tech there as well.
In that place, we were using CakeTalking and JAWS, which I hate with a passion.
I'm so glad never to have to use it again in my lifetime.
That's what I'm doing now.
Hopefully anyway, he says.
Now watch it come up that I have to. We'll see.
I've just doomed myself.
But that was an experience anyway.
I got then into Cubase.
At that time, Cubase 3.7 was somewhat accessible with a screen reader.
A screen reader, if you don't know, is the piece of software that allows
a blind person to use a computer at all.
These days, you will have heard of things like NVDA, like JAWS,
VoiceOver on the Mac, Orca on Linux, this kind of things.
Even your phones have a screen reader's built in.
Then Cubase was accessible. It's not now.
It's changed, unfortunately, from what I know.
Then I moved on to a free sequencer from a guy in the UK called James Bowden.
He worked at Dolphin Computer Access, and Dolphin Computer Access
is a manufacturer of screen readers.
But in his spare time, he made this sequencer, and I used that
for 13 years up until 2016.
That brings me to present day.
Now, I use Logic Pro on the Mac, which is accessible.
It's an Apple-built product, and Apple made the screen reader
that I use, which is VoiceOver.
Now I compose for myself and professionally,
and I gig and all these things using a MacBook Pro and Logic Pro X.
Well, it's actually not Logic Pro X anymore.
It's now Logic Pro 11.2. So times change. But yes.
Long answer. Sorry about that.
No, not at all.
I love long answers.
Now you're also working with some companies to test
their accessibility features, right?
That is true.
I have worked alongside Native Instruments,
particularly Native Instruments.
I've done product demos for companies like Fracture Sounds
and Spitfire Audio and things like this on some of their products.
In my spare time, I run my own YouTube channel and podcast as well, actually.
On the YouTube channel, I demonstrate products I like the sound of
that give me good feels and inspiration, and I do a lot
of that sort of things, and it's quite fun.
You work with Komplete Kontrol?
Yes, sitting right in front of me, right here in this shot, actually.
This is the keyboard I use and gig with every day.
My pride and joy.
For those who are interested in,
if you go to Andre Louis' YouTube channel,
you will see him play exactly in the same setting of what we are seeing right now.
Yes.
I saw you play jazz, and I love that.
Yeah, this is where I live, this is the jazz land.
I love all that.
I love improvisation and soloing, and I compose music and all this kind of stuff.
You're teaching also, right?
Yeah, I teach Logic to blind students because I wanted to give them
some of the opportunities I've had.
Do they come to your studio or do you do that virtually or how do you do that?
Well, pre-pandemic, I always did it in person.
Then pandemic taught me the value of remote learning, and it saved
a lot of time and effort on their part and traffic.
Now I just do it remotely.
I would like to talk a little bit about
some of the projects you've worked on.
For example, I know you released a CD with another artist.
Can you talk about this recent release?
I've had a few recent releases with a few different people.
The first thing I released with somebody else is my neighbor
who lives upstairs from me. He's a drum and bass artist called Zero T.
He has worked with renowned producers like Goldie from Metalheads
and things like this.
His back catalog is vast, spanning the last 20, 30 years, I believe.
Very nice guy.
We've done a few albums together, had a few EPs as well and some singles.
Then another guy I worked with is a guy called Andrew, and his name is Born74
from Wales.
He found me through Facebook, and we started working together.
We've had a couple of releases on vinyl under the Colin Curtis
label, so that's been quite fun.
Yeah, I mean -
Zero T found you also in Instagram.
Sorry for interrupting. Right?
He found me on Twitter, actually, when I was on Twitter.
But yeah, we became fast friends.
We worked out that we lived in the same block because a neighbor had
a very loud party, and it was the start of a lifelong friendship, basically.
If I go back to your first release with Zero T, this one was called Kilburn?
That's right.
We have released the subsequent one, which is Kilburn Park.
I think Kilburn was released in 2022 or '21.
I forget.
Time goes by so quickly.
There's actually a great documentary about that.
There is.
I was going to mention that, but you got there.
It's a good one.
Can you talk about this project a little bit?
Because it's a huge one.
It was very fast-release, it was...
You worked with a lot of collaborators on this one.
Yeah, there's quite a few different people.
I haven't met all of them, but the internet is vast
and allows you to do things like this.
But because we were neighbors, we were able to just work very quickly
and seamlessly together, but we didn't need to be neighbors.
Again, the internet comes into play here.
We actually work and still do to this day using Dropbox.
I never go to his house and work.
He never comes to my house to work.
We don't need to, even though he's probably within throwing distance
if I try really hard.
Dropbox is a thing.
We were able to turn around a lot tunes super quickly as a result.
That's how we've done every subsequent release as well.
Was it one track, one new collaborator?
or did you also do work -
You didn't do in person, right?
It was... you didn't...
We didn't need to necessarily for that album.
We've recorded vocalists in my living room right here behind me to my right.
There's a track we have done which was not on the Kilburn EP, it was on another EP
called Deusa, D-E-U-S-A, and the singer was a lady called Roberta Silva.
Because I can record in here and produce in here, and I've got
another microphone on the other side of the room, we record the vocals in here.
For that, we did need actually to be in person.
But for the majority of what we do, we can work remotely.
Yeah. I watched this documentary
and it was very interesting because
we can see you in action, actually, with all the tools that are around you.
That's very fun.
It was really fun to do that.
I love showing people that as blind people, we're just as able as you.
I think a lot of people have this preconception, or misconception, perhaps.
It stems from probably the '80s when things were a lot harder.
But computers are powerful enough to allow me to do what I do.
If you're running a studio, I can do that job.
We were talking about that with...
I interviewed Kemal Gorey, who is the secretary of RAMPD.
He's brilliant.
We were talking about this preconceived idea that, Okay,
because I have a visual impairment, I cannot do a score for a movie.
He said, Well, that's completely stupid.
I have my whatever technique.
It's all fear of people of not being able to -
It's fear, but it's also ignorance.
There's a difference, but it's a fine line.
You don't know what you don't know, but don't still assume that
what you know is current.
Always ask, always research, always find out.
Yeah, we live in this assumptions world,
unfortunately, and it's usually up to us
as disabled people to come to people and say, Well, there is no difference.
Yeah, I think you're right, exactly.
Okay, so what about the second project with Andrew?
What was that?
Okay, that was an interesting one.
He found me through Facebook and he had heard my music.
I'm not 100% sure what he heard, whether it was the collaboration
with Zero T or my own stuff.
But he came to me, he said, I need a keyboard player on some project I'm working on.
Can you help?
I was like, Sure, just send it to me. And he sent it to me.
I can tell you, because he would agree and he'll laugh, the bass was terrible.
I was like, You can't have chords in one key and bass in another key.
I was polite about it, but I said, Look, I'm going to redo these parts.
I know you only asked me to do chords, but I'm going to redo these parts.
Then he had to listen and he goes, You've done exactly what
I wanted to hear, so would you like to work together on things?
It just went from there, really.
We have this great relationship where I can explain to him why something doesn't work
in a nice way, and he'll listen and take that on board,
and he's much better about it now. We've done a lot of things since then.
But that first track was interesting.
It got a lot better.
He's a great guy and we're very good friends.
But yeah, that first track was interesting.
Okay.
What's the name of the album?
Oh, Mind Vibrations.
I think It was released on the
Tru Thoughts label out of the UK,
which is big because they're a really big name.
I don't know thousands about them, but they're a big enough label that
you'll find them having released a lot of different artists over the years.
Their back catalog is pretty, pretty vast, I must say.
I think Quantic and Moonchild and things like this are on the Tru Thoughts label.
They're not nobodys.
To be released on a label like this is just fantastic.
In terms of projects, are you working on something new
right now that is in the future?
I think we're always working on something. I often get asked by Zero T or Andrew,
Oh, just stick some chords down on this or something.
Then I just do it and I go away.
It's in Dropbox for six months, four months, eight months.
I forget I've done half the things.
The next thing I know, Oh, look, our release is happening next week.
I'm like, Did I play on that? They're like, Yeah, you did.
A lot of times it's like, I will turn something around super quick.
Zero T mentions this in the documentary.
He says, Give me some chords and he'll a way to make a cup of tea,
and I've done it. [Laughs]
I enjoy that.
For me, working with people, I have a zero tolerance inbox policy,
and that's also true for music.
If there's something I need to do, I need to it so that it's done
and I don't have to think about it.
Not because I don't like it, but because I don't want you to be waiting on me.
I'll turn something around the same day, preferably the same hour, if I'm capable
of doing it and I'm not busy.
I just believe in that kind of work ethic.
I think it's very, very important.
I'm going to come back to your projects.
Are you also playing live in clubs?
Oh, yeah.
Even just this weekend, I did that actually.
I played a little in a cocktail bar in London called MU.
It's a little Japanese cocktail bar in East London.
I enjoy that quite a bit. Good fun.
I'm actually going to be touring Belgium in February with a band.
Very fun.
Can we follow that?
Is it announced somewhere that we can follow?
There's a Facebook group for the band.
The band is called Jamtastic, as in J-A-M, Tastic.
You can see where we will be playing.
There's some videos of previous gigs that we've done and tours.
Loads of fun.
When is it, the tour?
Our first gig is February the 28th.
I think we're out there until March the seventh.
We have a few days.
We're not playing every night, I don't think.
I don't think all the gigs have been finalized yet either.
But if you are in Europe and close to or in Belgium, yeah,
I'd love to have you come and say hello.
Well, there will be a resource page with this [interview], so I'm going
We're going to share that so that people can have a look.
That would be amazing.
I'm intrigued by all the equipment that is around you.
Can you talk about your equipment?
Yeah, to be honest, anything on the right-hand side of me now,
which is possibly your left, I don't know if the camera's flipped or not,
but is not really in use anymore.
This bottom device here, which is a Roland Fantom-XR,
is not often in use because hardware. And Mac and hardware -
Well, Logic and hardware, particularly - don't play very nicely together
because you control the sounds of the hardware through MIDI program changes.
A bit like dialing a phone number over MIDI, if you will.
But the thing is that's not easy to set up.
I used to use that when I was using Windows to do all my sequencing.
Now it just sits connected to my Windows PC, not my Mac.
There's a lot of sounds in there that I would probably use more
if I could, but I have given them up. It's a sad thing.
The majority of stuff that is in use still is this keyboard in front of me and
the Mac behind me to the right, which you might just see far away in the distance.
That's what actually I'm talking to you on right now.
There's a computer keyboard here which is connected to my Windows PC.
There's a computer keyboard up to here, which is the one I use for the Mac.
There's a mic I'm talking to you on now.
There's another mic far back in the corner.
That's where my wife sits when we do our podcast together.
Very good. It's-
Oh, the mixer, of course.
Got to have a mixer.
All the magic happens with Logic Pro, right?
Yes, it does.
Although, actually, just recently, to the right of the mixer
is this pad controller device here, which is a new toy for me,
which I love very much, called Ableton Move.
Ableton just recently released this in October of '24.
It's an accessible groove box Really enjoyable.
Very travel-friendly, very cute, very small, but extremely
accessible, and I love it.
Very nice.
You use Ableton software for that, right?
Well, actually, you don't need to.
I mean, you can, but Ableton Move itself is a standalone groove box machine.
It's got four tracks of audio or MIDI, and it's got a built-in sampler,
and it has built-in sounds as well.
It's a very, very fun device.
When you have a new toy like that, how do you explore it?
I mean, you are an accessibility expert in all that equipment.
Yeah, it depends on the device, but in the case of this device, I was told that
there was a screen reader function built into it, which is run from a web browser.
You visit the site of the Move -
in the case of a browser, you go to move.local for example -
and now when you get there, there's something
called the Move Manager.
This allows you to upload and download your sets and your samples and so on.
But if you add a different URL to this move.local page
and you type in /screen-reader, It comes up with a page which uses
Aria Live regions, which talks to a screen reader like your
PC or your Mac or your phone screen reader, and any control that you touch
on the device gets spoken by your normal screen reader.
A lot of people are confused by this.
I did a video about this, by the way, because it's a ground-breaking piece
of software and technology, really.
They've never released anything quite like it before, and I don't know of any other
accessible Groovebox in this way at all.
Not standalone, anyway.
There's Machina, but you are required to be tethered to a computer to use it.
But this you don't need to be.
It connects to your WiFi.
To explore it was just getting to grips with using the Move Manager web page and
then learning what all the controls did by reading the manual and talking to one
of the Ableton people that I work with called Adi, who's phenomenal, by the way.
That's how I got into this whole thing.
I was the first blind person to actually do a demo
about this screener stuff online.
Also the same for Native Instruments.
When Native Instruments became accessible in 2016, again, I was luckily able
to get in on the ground floor, and I was the first person to do
a demo of that then as well.
That's exciting.
That's so exciting. I love stuff like this.
Yeah, and it shows that really accessibility starts to be more
and more present in our digital tools, which we waited a long time.
I remember Cubase because I remember the accessibility issues
that started to happen.
Then this group that gathered together and tried to make it accessible,
but for a reason could not.
That's right.
Yeah.
It shouldn't be this way.
Everything should just work.
But unfortunately, there are a lot of these in-house custom libraries
that people use that mean that a screen reader doesn't know how to talk to them.
That precludes us from being able to use it, which is a shame.
Yeah. And it's a good segue to my next question.
In RAMPD, because we are both in RAMPD, we are both RAMPD pro members,
and people who follow my podcast now know quite a lot about RAMPD
because it's an important organization.
We frequently talk about what accessibility
in the disability culture is.
I like this question because everybody has a different definition of
what it means for each artist to work in
an environment that allows to increase
accessibility in disability culture.
I'm going to ask you, what does it mean for you to work in that environment?
In 2017, I went on tour with a band.
The band is called Still Pan Fusion.
That was the first time I'd ever used a MacBook on stage with
Logic and everything like this.
Accessibility on that tour meant that when we had a piece of music
that required a sitar and I had to turn the drone up and down and I had to know
what track I was on to do that.
I'd have headphones connected to my Mac that would not go to front of house
because no one needs to hear screen reader blaring out of the PA.
That's terrible.
But what it meant was that when I would go to the right track with this sitar on it
and touch one of the controls in front of me here, these eight knobs.
One of them was the tone volume - the drone volume, sorry.
I turn up the drone volume, I play my bit, the whole band comes in after I'm done,
I turn it down, I then go to the piano track because that's where I'm supposed to be,
and then I begin to play. So accessibility means that I can do this
completely blind, while still knowing that I'm in the right place,
doing the right thing and not turning the wrong knob.
Because you can't do this thing where
you gently tap a key... [♪ Playing the piano ♪]
Okay, that's the wrong sound. [♪ Playing the piano ♪]
That's the wrong sound.
You need to know exactly where you are.
Hearing the speech tell me the track I'm on, do the right thing,
play the right thing, turn it down and carry on, that's professional.
Unprofessional is what I just showed you because no one should have to hear that.
That's partly what accessibility means to me.
It means having the same access and understanding and usability
that my sighted counterparts do in this industry.
But what it also means is working with people that appreciate me for me and
make my life easy and look out for me.
This band was like that.
They would make sure that I was safe and sat down before things were unpacked
so that I wasn't in the way or going to be in the way, because accessibility
is not just a one-way street.
Accessibility is good for everybody.
If the blind guy who could be standing around, not necessarily meaning to
be standing around, gets in the way, it's better he sat down, and then when
everybody's ready, we'll get them back on stage and we'll do the thing, right?
Yeah.
Again, long-winded answer, but accessibility to me
is more than just the name.
It's a way of life, and I think that's the best way I can put it.
It's a way of life.
That's a good way to put it.
I remember I was talking with Lachi a few years ago, actually,
it was just before RAMPD started.
She was telling me her story about when she started to form a band,
and most of the band consisted of visually impaired, lots
of different visually impaired people.
They were invited to play in clubs, I think.
Of course, there was so much improvement
that could be made in this club where, of course, you needed to
have stairs or a huge step to go to the stage
that you could probably not detect if someone is not pointing it out.
Then the fact that it was dark
because she has a vision that you really
need to have some light for her to be able to feel what is happening around.
There was no help.
She couldn't find anyone to...
Where's the manager?
Can someone call someone?
At least, is there...
They were feeling completely lost in this environment.
We were talking about that in - I'm a wheelchair user.
For me, the ramp is a necessity or an access to the stage, if it's not a ramp,
an access to the stage is a necessity.
But then people, when they talk about accessibility, I frequently talk with
some venues owners and things like that.
For them, accessibility is the ramp.
I said, No, it's so much more than that.
Again, it's a way of life, yeah?
Exactly, yeah.
I can relate to this whole high stage thing.
There's a place in Brixton called Hootananny, and I
played there a couple of times. It's high.
When I'm standing, the stage is probably higher than my keyboard is to the floor.
It's higher than that.
I was getting closer to the edge of the stage and I didn't realize this,
and I had my keyboard on my back because that's how I carry it in a backpack-style thing.
I was very top-heavy.
I just got this grab from behind and I thought, What's happening?
Am I being attacked?
No, I was being saved because I was about two inches from falling headfirst
off the stage and it's high.
So I would have hit concrete and I would have been in serious pain
with the added weight of a keyboard on my back.
Because there's no barrier around that stage, you're gone.
So I have a hate of this stage now, and I don't want to play there
ever again if I don't have to.
Were you able to report that to the owners?
No, because I just didn't think about it and they wouldn't have cared.
It doesn't seem like the venue that would have cared.
There's no edge or ledge or anything.
You just there or you're not.
I don't like that stage ever again.
I understand.
Oh, man.
Well, thank you. I have a last question for you.
It's about people who might have collaborated with you in your career
and that you think of as people who maybe guided you or motivated you
or have a special place in your career.
If you had a few names to give, who would it be and why?
Instantly, my MIDI teacher, Jez Nash
from RNC, because he saw that I had not
really used a DAW for sequencing before.
DAW, by the way, is digital audio workstation, like Cubase,
like Pro Tools, Logic, all of these things.
Well, it's a podcast, I can't really tell you
the story, but suffice to say, I was able to get hold
of a DAW and begin sequencing now using accessible software instead
of a keyboard that did not talk.
Also because the keyboard I told you about earlier in the podcast, the SQ-16, was at
my prior school, I didn't have anything anymore because I'd left that place.
He was able to connect me with a decent DAW,
which is no longer decent, as we've talked about.
That enabled me to then use it for the next two, three years,
which helped me immensely.
I was able to still write and still compose, and I still have, again,
those tracks from all those years gone by.
I'm very, very grateful to him for his willingness to see good in me, I guess.
I think the impact of great teachers, and you will be a great teacher
to your own students, it's really important
because it not only gives you some solutions to your problems, basically,
but also you carry it for your whole life.
Yeah.
I remember him so fondly because he was just excellent,
both as personally and publicly, likes a teacher and a friend as well.
Someone I would be happy to have dinner with, buy a drink for.
I owe him a lot. I owe him a lot.
Well, thank you so much for this conversation.
Thank you for having me.
I wish you a great tour -
Can I just say one last plug is to say, Check my podcast too, please.
Oh yeah. Go ahead.
Where can we check your podcast?
My podcast is because we're a blind-sighted couple, I'm blind and
my wife is sighted, we started a podcast last year called StroongeCast.
Now, the name Stroonge comes from the first time we met, and I was probably
playing with keyboards or being geeky or something, and she came to visit me
and she said that you're "stroonge," meaning strange, but I like you.
I said, What does this mean?
She said, Well, that's my word for strange.
Now, she doesn't remember this conversation at all.
This is in 2007, but I do.
The word just fell out of use.
But when I was looking for a podcast name, I was like,
I need something that no one else has.
When you Google, S-T-R-O-O-N-G-E, cast, the only thing
that comes up is my podcast.
It's very, very hard to find a word or compound word
that no one else has used in their life.
So I did.
Very good.
Well, we will post that on this resource page that I was mentioning earlier.
Thank you.
Okay, Thank you. Have a great day and a great tour.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for having me.
Thank you for listening to my story today.
Thank you. Bye, take care.
Bye-bye.
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