My process

The tools used to make music are no longer a secret. Digital audio workstations ship with libraries that would once have been the envy of professional studios: thousands of pre-recorded loops, MIDI patterns, software instruments and effects. Apple’s Logic Pro, in particular, arrives with a loop library large enough to support entire careers. That reality introduces a quiet tension. If so much of the material is shared, where does authorship sit and what distinguishes a finished piece of music from the components it is built from?

My music is made entirely inside Logic. I use Apple’s loop library, its software instruments and its MIDI resources as they are provided. There is no attempt to obscure that fact. The interest, for me, lies in how these tools behave once they are combined, stressed, reduced and arranged over time and in the sequence of decisions that turns a collection of available parts into a finished structure.

What follows is an account of that process.

The Apple Loop Library as an Instrument

Apple Loops are often framed as shortcuts, defined by what they are not: not recorded live, not bespoke, not unique. I found that framing unhelpful. It treats the loop library as inert material rather than something that must be learned.

What eventually made more sense to me was to think of the library as an instrument. Like any instrument, it offers a fixed range of gestures, timbres and constraints. It rewards familiarity. Knowing which loops combine cleanly, which resist combination and which only work under narrow conditions becomes a form of technique rather than selection.

Apple’s own documentation is clear that the loops bundled with Logic are licensed for royalty-free commercial use, including in released music and audiovisual work, as stated directly in the Logic Pro software license agreement.

That license does not confer authorship by default. It simply facilitates experimentation. The loop library presents phrases that can be played straight, misplayed deliberately or dismantled entirely. Some loops I test for only a few seconds before discarding. Others are reduced to fragments or repurposed rhythmically or harmonically. Very few survive in anything close to their original form.

Over time, I stopped thinking about whether a sound was “mine” in origin and started paying attention to how it behaved under pressure from other elements. That shift made the work feel less like assembly and more like navigation.

Breaking Things Apart

Loop-based music is often assumed to involve simple stacking: drag, drop and repeat. In practice, most material is altered almost immediately.

Tempo is shifted. Notes are removed. Rhythmic emphasis is changed. Loops are sliced and stretched. MIDI phrases are often stripped down to their underlying note patterns and rebuilt from there.

Logic’s loop library includes both audio and MIDI content and I rely heavily on both. A single MIDI pattern can be reassigned to different instruments, reshaped or reharmonised entirely. A piano arpeggio might become a distorted bass pulse, a granular pad or a percussive accent depending on the synth engine applied.

In that context, the loop functions less like a recording and more like notation.

This approach aligns with how Logic itself is designed to be used. Apple has long emphasised the modularity of MIDI loops in its own demonstrations and product materials, presenting them as starting points rather than finished statements.

What matters in practice is not the presence of a loop but the degree to which it is interrogated.

Borrowed Performances, Used Sparingly

Logic includes a set of Session Players designed to behave as responsive virtual musicians, reacting to tempo, arrangement changes and performance controls as the track develops.

Session Players are built from recordings by professional musicians, but their purpose is not to preserve a take. Instead, they expose parameters such as feel, intensity, rhythmic density and articulation, allowing parts to evolve alongside the structure of the track, as described in Apple’s documentation for Session Players. A drummer can thin out as an arrangement opens up. A bass part can simplify or push forward without being rewritten. The performance adjusts as structure changes.

In practice, I use Session Players to support tone, direction and momentum rather than to lead a piece. They sit behind the core material, reinforcing movement or weight.

When pushed hard enough, these tools can become central voices rather than support systems. Their customisation tools allow performances to support structure or lead it, depending on how they are pushed, adjusted and constrained.

Structure as the Primary Focus

If there is a consistent focus in my work, it is structure. Many tracks are built with a cinematic sensibility, though not in the conventional trailer-music sense. The concern is pacing: when elements enter, how long they remain and how much space is left between them.

This has become more pronounced over time. Early on, I added far more material than I do now. Logic makes density effortless and for a while I treated that as progress. Eventually, I noticed I was solving problems I had created myself. Removing parts became more productive than adding them and that shift now governs most sessions.

Volume is treated less as a technical setting and more as a narrative device. Certain sections are mixed deliberately thin, allowing moments to exist without being overdetermined. Builds are approached cautiously. Rather than constant escalation, tension is introduced selectively.

Bridges are used not simply to vary material but to reset attention, to create the sense that something has shifted even if the harmonic content remains similar. In an environment where dense sound is easy to achieve, absence becomes a tool.

Genre is an Outcome, Not a Target

The music is often described using compound terms, “electronic rock”, “cinematic electronic” or “soundtrack-influenced”. These labels are descriptive after the fact. The process itself does not begin with a genre template.

I usually start with sounds that suggest motion, stillness or contrast and let coherence emerge from how those elements interact. Genre blending tends to happen incidentally. A distorted synth might carry the aggression associated with rock while rhythmic programming borrows from electronic idioms. Ambient passages sit alongside more rigid structures.

The goal is internal consistency, not classification.

Knowing When Not to Add

Logic’s library makes it trivial to introduce another layer: another pad, another arpeggio or another effect. The more difficult skill is recognising when additional material clarifies an idea and when it merely fills space.

Sound effects are introduced sparingly. When they appear, they are intended to signal transition or emphasis rather than decoration. Clarity is prioritised over spectacle.

These are working constraints I have adopted because they reduce listening fatigue and make decisions easier to evaluate.

A Process Still Forming

The way I work inside Logic has not been fixed. It has shifted gradually, often in response to mistakes, limitations or habits that stopped being useful. Earlier work leaned more heavily on density and accumulation. Over time, that approach gave way to a greater focus on reduction, pacing and structure.

Much of this change came from repetition rather than insight. Working within the same tools for long enough makes certain problems recur. Patterns emerge, both in the material and in how decisions are made. Some techniques prove durable. Others quietly fall away.

This process continues to evolve. There are aspects of Logic I do not use deeply, approaches I have not explored and limitations I have not yet tested properly. The tools remain larger than my current understanding of them.

What Remains Open

None of this resolves the broader questions around originality, shared tools or authorship. Those debates remain open. What working within a common library has changed for me is where the creative effort sits.

The work is shaped less by the uniqueness of its raw sounds than by the sequence of judgements applied to them: what to keep, what to alter, what to remove and how long to let a moment breathe. Under conditions of abundance, those decisions become the substance of the work itself.

The process remains adjustable and unfinished, much like the tools it relies on. Whether the results resonate is ultimately for listeners to decide.