Strange Thing About Logic Pro and Apple Loops

When I started making music again in 2009, it was first with Garageband, which led to Logic Pro 9 within the year. Not long after that, Logic Pro X was released, and I was swept along with it. What I'd liked, early on, was the convenience of the Apple Loops and the Apple Instruments included with the software. They helped to spur my creativity and musicality after they had been suppressed for 15 years. Now, I'll rarely browse the list of Loops, except to drop in a simple rhythm to provisionally keep time on a sketch, or to use a drum MIDI region that I'll manually edit and elaborate. Although I'm familiar with other DAWs, I'm effectively stuck in LPX, although for the past decade I've had the presence of mind to keep one eye on the cross-platform exit door, should the Mac environment become untenable due to unsympathetic development. (It's either Reaper, Ardour and/or Bitwig after the dataclysmic demise of Apple as an amenable platform for music production.)

However, it didn't take long before I'd develop a distaste for Apple's drum loops. No matter what style of music they represented, they all seemed to be playing the same beat, along the lines of "quarter note/dotted quarter note/eighth note/quarter note." Then I noticed that they were laden with transients that muddled their sound and others' around them. As I gradually branched out into third-party software instruments and samples, I developed further distaste for the sound of Apple Loops, as well as for the Instruments. This involved their sounds' making me feel anxious and nauseated, which in turn became the main reason to avoid them. When I hear them, I feel the impulse to stop them and put them away, as though they're physically or psychically bad for me. Maybe engineers at Apple pray to Satan over them; I don't know (and maybe I shouldn't doubt it).

When Apple introduced the Drummer feature to Garageband and Logic, I initially I thought it a great way to get a more sympathetic "performance" of a drum kit. Aside from the ability to assign an instrument track for the virtual drummer to follow, and the ability to augment the kit via the GUI, I half-despise this feature, because the drum sounds make me feel uneasy and queasy. Not only that, they have no presence, being laden with transients, which turns into noise when compression is applied in order to bring the kit to the fore. All that I use the Drummer feature for is for making sketch performances that I export as MIDI files, then re-import to MIDI tracks and apply better-sounding sample libraries, which in turn suggest edits and tweaks to the parts to fit the arrangement. Yeah, it's kinda cheating, but though I have also composed drum parts from scratch, if the machine can come up with something that's close to what's in my head already, half the work = half the time.

Perhaps I should add that I've been enjoying being able to use Logic (or any DAW) like a multi-track tape recorder, by outputting the signal of a real-time-performed MIDI instrument through a buss sent to an audio-recording track; then deleting the MIDI track and any trace of the virtual instrument and its parameters. A return to destructive linearity and irrevocable imperfection – and having to just live with it.