The men of acclaimed production duo Louis the Child both got their starts early in life.
"I got into DJing after my parents bought me some DJ software for Christmas when I was in 6th or 7th grade," says Robby Hauldren. " I wasn’t super into electronic music yet but I was starting to get curious about DJing. I got the hang of it and started recording myself making mashups in the DJ software and uploading them to SoundCloud. A year or two later I met Freddy through some friends at school and heard he was producing his own electronic music. We had a very similar taste in electronic music and decided to meet up one day and make some music. I had played in bands before and recorded myself but I didn’t know much about producing electronic music. Freddy taught me a ton of what I know now. We started to release some music on SoundCloud and just kept at it. I think things started to get pretty serious once we got a manager and he showed us how to really get our music out on the internet and heard."
"I started producing in 5th grade, I was already a fan of daft punk, and had heard a song on the radio called 'Dooms Night' (Timo Maas Radio Edit) that kind of blew my mind at a young age, and some of my camp counselors showed me the Caspa Remix of 'Cockney Thug' by Rusko, and I was pretty hooked on dubstep and dance music," says Freddy Kennett. "I was producing nearly every day from then on. I was taking drum lessons and playing saxophone in the concert and jazz band, and was taking music theory classes and playing in a jazz band at Midwest Young Artists in Chicago. In 8th grade, when I heard of Robby making mashups and live edits of songs, I reached out to him to get together and make some tunes! The day we got together, we started Louis the Child."
Haulden likes to associate LTC more with a feeling than a sound.
"There’s certain 'sounds' or drum pockets people might associate us with, but in the end I know it’s a Louis The Child song when I get that feeling," he says.
"We usually make bubbly, vibrant dance music with a songwriting and melodic focus," adds Kennett. "We jump between any tempo that inspires us. We see genres as guidelines to utilize or break free from. We don’t like being put in a box, and we like to experiment."
Louis the Child's latest release is "Believe It."
"We made 'Believe It' with Madeon, who is one of the first artists we bonded over when we formed Louis The Child," says Hauldren. "Over the years he’s become a close friend and we decided to get together a few months ago to make music. When we’ve worked with him in the past we always started from scratch, but this time he wanted to write over something we had already started. We played him a few ideas and this one beat really struck a chord with him, and we spent most of the day just writing the vocal parts. We knew we wanted something simple, and we worked really hard at refining every line we wrote to get the most out of them."
"This is our new song featuring Madeon, who was one of our idols for the longest time, and still is," says Kennett. "Robby and I first were introduced to each other at a Madeon show at the bottom lounge in Chicago. The song itself is quite a happy and fun house tune that Hugo and I are singing on. It has a light and transcendent, dance energy, we’re super excited to play it live at the upcoming shows!"
As for gear:
"We’ve used Ableton live for a long time," says Hauldren. "All you need is a great sample library, some software synths like [serum, kontakt, analog labs, or synplant], and most of the time a midi keyboard. A lot of the time on the road we just use the MacBook keypad as a piano, which somehow is completely usable! I used the MacBook keypad to play the melody from our songs “Fire” and “Weekend”, and multiple others. Sometimes it’s fun to make songs in various places that aren’t a professional studio with nice speakers. That’s an amazing part of the digital age, you have a lot of freedom to create anywhere you’d like. You can even take your laptop to the beach. Haven’t tried that yet, haha."
Looking ahead, the guys have plenty planned for 2024.
"We have a tour planned for the Fall that we’re really excited for," says Hauldren. "Going to try and keep putting out music after the album too."
"We have an album on the way," adds Kennett. "Very excited! We’re done with the creation process so we feel relieved get ready!"
Photo by Joey Vitalari
