For several months in 2011, the radio hit “Pumped Up Kicks” by Foster the People was the song we couldn’t get out of our heads. For Mark Foster, who wrote the song, getting it out of his head — and into a demo — was no problem at all. Using Logic Pro, and playing all the instruments himself, Foster was able to write and record the single in just a day and a half. After the demo went viral on the web, the song climbed the charts and eventually became a kind of fan anthem at the band’s typically sold-out concerts.

Following a decade working dead-end jobs in Los Angeles while trying to make it as a songwriter and musician, a career-launching hit was more than Foster could reasonably have hoped for. But “Pumped Up Kicks” has sold more than four million copies. The group’s debut album Torches reached the Top 10 on the Billboard 200, a notable feat for a two-year-old band. And Foster the People have since become concert headliners, selling out impressive venues like Central Park SummerStage, Red Rocks Amphitheatre, and Gibson Amphitheatre, as well as drawing record crowds at Lollapalooza, Coachella, and South by Southwest. The band also performed on Saturday Night Live and at the Grammy Awards — where they received two nominations and played with The Beach Boys.

Foster credits much of his songwriting success to years of work with Logic Pro, which, by the time he wrote “Pumped Up Kicks,” had become his main creative instrument. “When I switched over to Logic, my songwriting changed drastically because it opened my eyes to being able to do a lot of things in one place,” he says. “Not just play piano, but put the bass part in. Not just lay in the bass, but put a drum pattern in. It also allowed me to learn various producer tricks that don’t have much to do with songwriting but really affect the overall listening experience.”

Chasing the Dream

Those opportunities for rich composition and control were a revelation to Foster, who grew up near Cleveland, Ohio, writing music from an early age. Inspired by a Beach Boys tape he received from his dad when he was six, Foster became a multi-instrumentalist, playing drums, piano, and guitar in various bands. “I guess that was the intro to songwriting for me, writing for many different kinds of musicians and styles of music,” he says.

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After graduating from high school, Foster followed his musical interests to Los Angeles, but his efforts left him discouraged. “I hit a ceiling with songwriting on acoustic guitar,” he says. “I realized that if I had no money to pay a producer for studio time, and didn’t know how to do it on my own, I was just going to continue to flounder. So I decided to get my own system and learn how to produce, because I didn’t want to rely on anybody else.”

But Foster’s first experiments with PC-based sound tools were frustrating. “After I worked a little while, my PC just turned to Swiss cheese. I remember being in a really good groove creatively, writing tons of songs, while my computer was crashing every 10 seconds. I’d start it up, make a couple of moves, and save them really quick. I would do that for hours. It was all I could do.”

During short-term production stints at various studios around Los Angeles, Foster came to see how he might do more. “Working in sessions with producers like Greg Kurstin and Switch, I saw how powerful Logic was. It seemed more intuitive and a better creative tool for a songwriter than Pro Tools. I knew I wanted Logic.”

Deep Logic

When he made his first decent paycheck for scoring a friend’s movie, Foster used it to buy a MacBook Pro and Logic. Having an application, operating system, and hardware all designed by Apple made for better stability and performance. “They’re made to run smoothly together,” he says. “Logic felt so intuitive, as if a musician had created it. It really sped up my workflow while letting me stay creative. I didn’t have to be a sound engineer to work the program, so I could just be a songwriter.”

The transition was sweetened by the useful tools that came with the application: “I loved the amount of control that Logic gave me, as well as all the instrument and effect plug-ins it came with, especially the EXS24 sampler and Space Designer reverb. And I use the Tape Delay and Compressor plug-ins all the time. As a rookie switching over, it was good to have these things at my fingertips and not have to buy a hundred outsourced plug-ins.”

With his growing Logic skills, Foster was finally able to land a musical day job. “My songwriting and producing in Logic continued to get better as I went deeper into the program,” he says. “I became so familiar with it that I was offered a full-time job as a composer scoring commercials at a company called Mophonics.”

Forming the Band

While working at Mophonics, Foster was encouraged to pursue his outside songwriting aspirations. Those efforts, which had ranged widely across genres, found real traction in 2009 when Foster (handling lead vocals, keyboards, piano, synthesizers, guitar, programming, and percussion) joined drummer Mark Pontius and bassist Cubbie Fink to form Foster the People. After the success of “Pumped Up Kicks,” which Foster wrote at the Mophonics studio, the band followed up with an EP called Foster the Peopleand their first album, Torches.

With a goal of creating 10 great, no-compromise songs for Torches, the band worked with accomplished producers Greg Kurstin, Rich Costey, and Paul Epworth. Foster brought to the studio fully developed versions of each song for the producers to hear. “I pretty much had all the songs demoed out in Logic myself,” he says. “As we looked at my sessions, it was easy to add stuff and integrate it with what I’d already done in Logic.”

New Direction

On a recent break from touring, Foster and the band were at Paramount Recording Studios in Hollywood writing material for their next album — tentatively scheduled for a 2013 release. For the new album, Foster is using the capabilities of Logic Pro to support a whole new creative approach. Moving away from the solo songwriting efforts by Foster that shaped their first album, this time the writing is coming from the band. Backing Foster, Fink, and Pontius in the studio, as they do on stage, are guitarist Sean Cimino and Isom Innis (keyboard, synthesizer, piano, programming, percussion, and background vocals).

“This second album is just a lot more evolved than the first,” says Foster. “We have more time to work on it and more resources, plus we’ve really gelled as a band. So we’re trying a lot of experiments. Yesterday the four of them were in a room without me for an all-day jam. I’ve come up with little scenarios, like every 10 minutes having them stop what they’re playing and switch out their jam.”

As the band broadens their sonic experiments, Logic Pro provides the creative glue. “In our sessions over the past few months, whether doing remixes for other artists or just writing stuff from the ground up, we’ve been passing Logic tricks back and forth and sharpening each other. That’s helped us in the studio, and I feel that we’ve really grown as producers.”

Drum Sessions

Because an important goal for the record is to capture the distinctive percussive elements of their live shows, Isom Innis and Mark Pontius have been playing together in another LA studio set up “with tons of drums.” Innis, a versatile percussionist, was excited about the approach. “It was kind of like heaven,” he says. “We had so much stuff. A huge concert bass drum. Six different drum kits. We attacked every single thing.”

While Pontius played drums to a click track to keep time, Innis listened using a DJ setup and advised Pontius in real time. “I would tell him to alter his kick-patterns and beats, just going by what was sounding good in the rooms,” says Innis.

The three-day sessions resulted in 180GB of drum tracks, with two engineers assigned to organize and trim them in Logic Pro. “We ended up getting so many varieties of styles,” says Innis. “Now we’ve been going through drum grooves and samples and cutting out the best four- or eight-bar phrases and turning them into Apple Loops.”

Innis says that the most-used Logic feature during the sessions has been Convert to Sampler Track. “We use it to build our own instruments, whether by sampling other records or sampling our own performances. For drums, but also for bass and synth, I’ve been creating a lot of different things with it.” Foster agrees, adding: “I like to use it on vocals. Just chop a weird vocal moment, spread it out on a keyboard, and then it’s all pitched. I use the samples as kind of a percussive effect.”

The hope is that the intense collaboration in the studio will yield a different sound for the new album. Says Foster: “I always start songwriting with drums, but I’ve never done it in any way like this before where all the drum samples are generated by our guys in-house. Once all those drum sounds are chopped up, I’ll be able to take the loops, beats, and single hits, turn them into an EXS24 drum kit, and write around that.”

Using the Toolbox

In writing and performing their songs, the band relies almost entirely on software instruments. And because Foster likes to customize his sounds, he depends heavily on the ability to save all the plug-ins that make up the sound as a single channel strip setting. Each setting combines the software instrument plus the effect plug‑ins that make up that sound. “I have a whole palette of sounds that I can use or easily modify,” he says.

To aggregate sounds for the album, Innis says they are also using the EXS24 sampler extensively: “I know many other samplers can weirdly distort sound, but not the EXS24. The bass on the tracks sounds so clear, and the human feel meshes great with those synthesized drums. People who know about it use it all the time, and it’s way more powerful than meets the eye.”

Initial editing passes on the new material have sent Foster frequently to his go-to Logic feature, Flex Time, which lets him quickly manipulate the timing and tempo of the tracks. “If I didn’t have Flex Time, I’d be really debilitated in trying to make my records. A track I’m working on now needed to be two beats per minute faster, but we’d already tracked horns and audio. So we just flexed it to correct the tempo.”

Studio to Stage

As the band resumes their current worldwide tour, they’re using MainStage to bring their rich studio sound to the stage. MainStage allows the band to ditch racks of complicated gear for a MacBook Pro that they can perform through. And because MainStage can directly open the plug-ins and settings they used in their Logic projects, they have available on stage the same sounds they used in the studio.

“We’re able to take most of the synth sounds that we’ve recorded for Torches and play them live instead of trying to have another keyboard re-create a sound,” says Foster. “So we’re able to use the exact sounds that were used on the record. That’s essential for our live show.”

When the tour ends this summer, the band plans to head almost immediately back into the studio to finish the album. Says Foster: “Creatively, this time the band is getting more of a voice. And I can’t wait to see what they come up with, because it’ll be better than anything I would have thought of alone. I could have locked myself in a room again to write this album, but I know we’ll make a much better record if we all contribute.”