--- title: "Producing with a DAW as a musician: Logic Pro X, Suañu de Gaita and what I learned along the way" slug: producing-with-a-daw-as-a-musician kind: essay summary: "How I produced my EP Suañu de Gaita (2019-2021) with Logic Pro X: why I chose that DAW, and what the process taught me about myself. If you want to understand how music production works, I recommend reading this post." publishedAt: 2026-07-08 updatedAt: 2026-07-08 --- I produced my EP [*Suañu de Gaita*](/en/blog/suanu-de-gaita) (2019-2021) with Logic Pro X. When I trained with Alberto Rionda and Javi Rubio, I understood that the path ran through mastering that tool from the inside: not as a sound engineer, but as a musician who needs technology to stay out of the way between him and the music. Producing is the process of turning a performance into a finished record. It has four main stages: recording (capturing the takes), editing (selecting and adjusting), mixing (balancing every element within the sound space) and mastering (preparing the final result for distribution). A DAW —Digital Audio Workstation— is the application that lets you digitise and manage that whole process: Logic Pro, Pro Tools, Ableton and the like are the environments where it all happens. ## Why Logic Pro X I came to Logic through the Mac ecosystem: clean integration, low latency, and above all, low friction. There are very powerful DAWs that force you to learn the software before you can make music. Logic flips that relationship: you can record on day one and edit seriously by the second week. For a musician whose priority is the sound and not the manual, that is no small thing. Logic's advantage is not being objectively the best DAW —it is that it lets you devote yourself to the music before the technique. ## Suañu de Gaita: the process I produced *Suañu de Gaita* (2021) between 2019 and 2021, in intermittent phases: spells of intense work, pauses, starting over. At first I lived it as a problem. Later I understood it was part of the process. The setup was simple: a Focusrite Scarlett interface, an AKG C214 microphone and Logic Pro X — enough to record, edit and mix a whole EP without an external studio. Every time I came back to the project with fresh ears, I heard the tracks differently. The DAW keeps everything —every take, every version, every mixing decision— and that turns the project into an archive of who you were when you recorded it. In those returns I learned more about how I hear the [Asturian gaita](/concepto/gaita-asturiana) than in many hours of rehearsal. The microphone does not lie. The notes you thought were clean sound that way until you see them in the waveform. There are phrasings that go unnoticed live and in the studio take on a weight you did not expect: from how the [punteru](/glosario/punteru) breathes on the long notes to whether the [roncón](/glosario/roncon) has the structural weight it needs. Producing your own record forces you to articulate what you want it to sound like. Not as an abstract idea: as a concrete decision on a fader. What the DAW gave back to me, over those two years, was a sharper picture of how I think musically — with my bad habits and my real preferences. ## openDAW What I have described so far is the musician's experience inside the DAW. But there is another, more prior question: how does a DAW work on the inside? What actually happens when you drag a track or apply an effect? That question stayed with me for years, more or less latent, and when I found **openDAW** ([opendaw.org](https://opendaw.org/)) it began to have an answer. It is an open-source DAW that runs directly in the browser, with no installation and no cost: an environment where you can see how the logic of these tools is built while you use them. If you want to understand the mechanism before committing to Logic or other professional software, it is the cleanest entry point I know. I analyse it in detail at [labs.tever.es](https://labs.tever.es): [openDAW: a DAW in the browser](https://labs.tever.es/blog/opendaw-daw-en-el-navegador). ## Bibliography - Apple Inc. *Logic Pro User Guide*. [support.apple.com/guide/logicpro](https://support.apple.com/guide/logicpro) (continuously updated). The official reference for workflow, MIDI editing and mixing. - Savage, Steve. *Bytes and Backbeats: Repurposing Music in the Digital Age*. University of Michigan Press, 2011. On how DAWs transform the musician's relationship with their recorded work. - Leyshon, Andrew. "The Software Slump?". *Environment and Planning A*, vol. 41, no. 6, 2009. On the democratisation of production tools and independent musicians. --- If you are interested in the compositional process that comes before the studio, I tell it in [The punteru: first notes step by step](/en/blog/the-punteru-first-notes).