Band Mate
Band Mate is a Logic Pro MIDI plugin for generating metalcore drum arrangements using band profiles, song sections and musician-focused workflow design.
- Role
- Design & Code
- Year
- 2026
- Status
- In progress
- Tags
- Audio Unit, Logic Pro, MIDI, Metalcore, Codex
What it is
Band Mate is an Audio Unit plugin for Logic Pro that helps you sketch metalcore songs faster. You pick a band profile, build a song structure section by section, intro, verse, chorus, bridge, breakdown, clean, outro, blast, break, and the plugin generates a full arrangement in that band’s style. Hit Export MIDI and the whole song drops straight into your session.
It’s not a loop library. It’s a song composer.
Profiled bands
Shipping with profiles based on:
- Polaris
- Sleep Token
- August Burns Red
- Killswitch Engage
- Currents
- Architects
- Parkway Drive
More coming.
Each profile is its own vocabulary: kick patterns, snare placement, ghost notes, cymbal choices, fills, the moves that band tends to reach for in a breakdown versus a chorus. Profiles don’t sample anyone. They capture how a drummer tends to play and let you reuse that language inside your own song.
Why
Drum tools usually push you toward one of two extremes: rigid loop libraries that repeat the same bar forever or unguided generative AI that gives you something technically correct and totally lifeless. Neither is much help when you’re writing a song.
Real drummers have a feel, a way they move between toms, a sense for where to sit back, a couple of signature moves. Band Mate tries to capture that feel as a profile and let you play with it like an instrument.
How it works
Two modes.
Arrange is where most of the work happens. Pick a profile, set a tempo or follow your host and start adding sections. Each section gets a length in bars, a specific pattern from the profile and per-section modifiers like Half-Time, Double Kick, Cowbell, Fills and Count In. Build it bar by bar or hit Generate Arrangement for an auto-built draft you can reshape.
Performance is for playing live against the active profile, host-locked or at a chosen BPM, with the same modifiers within reach.
When the arrangement feels right, Export MIDI sends the whole thing into Logic as a single MIDI region you can edit, re-voice or hand to your favourite drum sampler.
What’s next
More band profiles. A deeper pattern bank inside each one. A few new section types. Better visualisation in Performance mode.
The plugin is past MVP and I’m already writing songs with it, but the list is long.