Jason DasentAnalog Lab Pro
& Accessibility
London-based Jason Dasent is on a musical mission.
As a producer, engineer, keyboardist, and everything in between, he fuses soul with pop and funk with calypso flavors from his native Trinidad. But as a visually-impaired person, he’s committed to bridging the gap between accessibility and creativity. Jason kindly invited us into his musical domain to see how he explores music with KeyLab and Analog Lab Pro’s Accessibility features.
Creativity for a cause
Jason Dasent is a man of many talents. When he’s not recording artists, composing music for film and commercial purposes, or teaching music production, he’s busy living up to his reputation as one of the world’s leading advocates for accessibility in the musical field.
Originally hailing from Trinidad in the Caribbean, he’s spent over two decades honing his skills as a producer, performer, and teacher, with an contagiously enthusiastic approach that shines through in the music he makes. In 2019, he relocated to London to study for an MA, and he’s since become a well-known voice in the conversation around accessibility and music technology.
A changing landscape
Spearheading a shift towards making music production accessible for everyone, Jason and his team have worked with AVID, Native Instruments, and even Apple on their products. He works closely with engineers, product managers, and sound designers to develop intuitive solutions that enable differently-abled people to use in-demand music hardware and software.
A vital component of tech accessibility is text-to-speech functionality. This simply means spoken audio feedback that reflects the functions and settings of the hardware or software in question, converting anything that you would see or read into audible speech to help users navigate.
At the core of his own musical setup is KeyLab paired with Analog Lab Pro. Accompanying the release of V Collection 8.1 is a dedicated Accessibility mode that Jason helped design with our own product team.
Analog Lab Pro & Accessibility
With Jason’s expertise, we united Analog Lab Pro, KeyLab, and deep text-to-speech functionality for a fluid & accessible experience. Easily enabled in the settings, it works with any MIDI controller that’s linked up to Analog Lab, interfacing with your computer’s own text-to-speech engine, ensuring that it fits into any setup.
Let’s take a look at some examples of how text-to-speech could be used to streamline the Analog Lab Pro workflow for producers and music makers:
Browsing instruments and categories
Analog Lab Pro has a myriad of ways to find your sound; search by instrument, by genre, by timbre, and by sound designer. Accessibility mode reads the category and search filter names as you select them, so you’ll know which angle you’re approaching your search for sound at all times.
Selecting presets
Within every category or search results page, there’s a list of presets to go through. As you scroll, text-to-speech tells you the name of each individual preset, both library and user, so you can easily keep track of the sounds you’ve heard.
Changing parameters
Both parameters and parameter values are part of the real-time feedback that Accessibility mode provides. Not only does that help you navigate the Analog Lab Pro interface, it also helps with those subtle tweaks that make a good patch sound great.
Splits & Layers
Quickly determine the instruments you want, the positions of your keyboard split, the balance of your multiple preset layers, and individual settings for each of them - every part of Analog Lab Pro’s split/layer functionality can be navigated with text-to-speech.
KeyLab & MIDI Controllers
While you may simply use Analog Lab Pro as an isolated sound source or plugin, it works brilliantly as an accompaniment to your MIDI controller of choice. Analog Lab perfectly integrates with KeyLab thanks to an easy-to-use layout and smart mapping. It’ll also play nice with other controllers, all of which can be instantly linked to Accessibility mode.
Inspiration,
meet independence
Analog Lab has been all about simplicity, ease of use, and fun from day one.
We’re committed to provide the quickest, most inspiring, and most gratifying route to incredible sound for producers, musicians, and audio enthusiasts from all walks of life. The energy that Jason Dasent emits when he’s in his creative element is infectious, and a testament to the importance of accessibility in music.