In Conversation with Logan Shadrick
Guitarist-composer, expansive storyteller
Logan Shadrick is an Atlanta-based guitarist-composer with a lifelong love for creating music. A dedicated student of theory and performance, he began playing drums at age nine before expanding to guitar and piano.
While classically trained, Shadrick discovered a love for jazz early. “Jazz came into my life like a revelation. It wasn’t structured like other music. It breathed. It danced. It spoke in a way that felt human: emotional and alive.
In jazz, there’s space to explore, to question, to respond. You’re not just playing music. You’re reacting to it and shaping it as it unfolds. Jazz teaches you how to listen and adapt. To feel deeply and freely express unseen emotion.
But jazz also taught me discipline. To understand freedom, you must first understand structure. By studying harmony, chord voicings, and phrasing, you reach beyond the feel of music and learn how it moves and evolves. This helps improvisation become second nature.”
Freedom Within Structure
That idea, freedom within structure, shapes his approach to composing. His guitar is the lab where he explores mood and emotion by hand and discovers the untold story that lies beneath and between the notes.
Shadrick received a scholarship to study jazz guitar at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. There, he performed with the Natalie Boeyink Jazz Ensemble, contributing solo guitar to arrangements of “How Insensitive” by Antonio Carlos Jobim and “Four” by Miles Davis.
While at Jacobs, he discovered, “Performance reveals a lot about both the performer and the audience. I began to notice how music affected people beyond the performance space. Not just in clubs or practice rooms, but through a shared story.”
Drawn to where music lives in a visual story, he continued his studies in film composition at Berklee College of Music before choosing to compose full time.
Improvisational Listening Shapes the Work
Shadrick doesn’t see his love for performance and film scoring as two competing factors but as two tracks benefiting one another. At the center of both his solo and film work is a practice of improvisational listening.
Shadrick’s solo catalog is modern fusion, where jazz meets classical, indie, and the spaces in between. It’s music that stands on its own but could live in film.
His approach to film scoring follows the same improvisational method. Live-core, dialogue-aware scoring that holds space for performance. Listening for arc, not just cue, he scores to ensure actors are supported, dialogue is protected, and subtext is felt.
“Music for picture moves in a similar way to jazz, with emotional honesty and a sense of transformational movement within structure.
My solo work gives me a playground to explore sound, while film scoring provides another world in which to interpret human emotion. Both help shape how audiences experience a story and how they remember it long after the sound fades away.
I’m not tied to any particular genre, but I do enjoy the emotional complexities in intimate drama, sci-fi, and psychological narratives. There’s a lot of perspective to explore.”
What’s Next
In his upcoming release, Hummingbird, set for release late 2026, Shadrick explores hope through a guitar instrumental that blends jazz harmony and indie lightness. It’s a composition that moves like wings, close enough to stir the air, wide enough to breathe.
And while his current focus is to produce memorable solo work and help audiences discover his sound, he is always looking for unique scoring opportunities that align with his approach to story.
“I am excited to share my music with audiences and build relationships in the music and film industries. I look forward to connecting with anyone who shares a passion for storytelling, through headphones or the big screen.”
