Louis Orion aka Altero started playing piano at the age of 5 and thereby got attached to catchy melodies from early on. Fast forward the 20 year old producer is now releasing his pop infused house tracks on the most sought after labels in the electronic music scene. We had the chance to catch up with him for a quick Q&A:
You’ve just released your new single “The Way I Feel”. The track features Dillon Wright and guitarist Alessandro Grasso. How did the track come to life and what is you philosophy on collaborations?
I wrote this track with Alessandro. I contacted him because I wanted to create an emotional track for someone, and I thought he was the perfect guy to help me. I sent him some chords I played on the piano, then he recorded it with the guitar and sent it to me. I immediately started producing it and knew that it was going to be a nice track. Then I contacted Dylan because I was convinced that his voice would fit the track perfectly.
What are the biggest challenges you face as an up and coming artist in the digital age?
The biggest challenges I had to confront are the competition between the many artists of the electro chill scene, and the difficulty of reaching the labels with each new music. Also, because of my perfectionist side, I release music only when I’m 100% satisfied with it.
Could you sum up some personal milestones in your artist development?
My first personal milestone is when I released ‘Coming Home’ on the Vlog No Copyright Music channel on YouTube. It brought me a lot of visibility for the next release, ‘Feeling’. And, this is my second milestone: with more than 400k views today on my own YouTube channel, this track was a real stepping stone for me. Then, I had a third milestone with ‘Hear Me Now’, my first label release, and first track which reached 1 million streams on Spotify. And my latest milestone is ‘One Day’ with NVRT, which reached more than 2.5 millions streams on Spotify.
Name 3 major mistakes you made and other musicians could learn from.
My 3 major mistakes are:
1 – When I deleted all my old music of my YouTube channel
2- When I decided to change my branding 3 times in a month, at the same time when I released my most viewed music (‘Feeling’, ‘Coming Home’ and ‘Hot Baby’)
3 – When I decided to make a genre that I didn’t master and that I didn’t like. It made me waste a lot of time, because I didn’t release any of this music.
What is the role of intuition when producing music?
It’s the most important thing. When intuition comes up with an idea, listen to it. It’s not always easy, but it’s so powerful. The best way to listen to it is to record your idea in singing it, with your phone for example. You are so ridiculous, but it works.
When you start a new track – what are the first steps?
Answer : “The first step is to take inspiration from a lot of tracks, even those in a different style. Then, I write some chords with a piano sound and I try to play melodies with a keyboard, or to sing it on my phone recorder.”
If from now on you could only use 3 plugins for the rest of your career, which ones would they be and why?
My 3 fav plugins are :
Kickstart – because it makes sidechain compression automatically with some additional options. It saves a lot of time.
Fruity Reverb 2 – I tried a lot of reverb plugins, but the default one is the best and easiest for me. An electro chill track without reverb is so dry…”
Sausage Fattener – It brings a lot of power to the track. But beware, excessive use really spoils everything and hinders the mastering.
How important are data insights for Altero’s (strategic) decisions?
The most important thing is to like what you do. But, when many people and Spotify curators listen to your music, you must understand what they like or not. So, the data insights are the best way to know what the listeners like, how old are they, where are they from, etc.
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