Hardware controller + lots of pre-made loops triggered manually. Also, a synthesizer operated manually in real time. This is how a lot of these were originally created - if you take different tools, you get vastly different results.This kind of music is basically all one loop, a few bars long, with lots and lots of layers. You bring layers in and out over time l, triggering them, muting them, fading them, and bringing effects in and out. That’s really all there is to it.
I once tried exactly this method and here's what I came up with:
https://soundcloud.com/djwarmonger/resi ... iginal-mix