The Caustic DAW

How much would you pay for a digital audio workstation for your phone or tablet? What if you could pair it with a matching desktop program? Well remember rule number 1- Pay for Nothing! Surely a free tool will not allow you to make real music. Surely. 

Well if you are just playing around with music and you haven't really gotten your system completely nailed down, you might want to take a look at Caustic, by Single Cell Software . Caustic is an app for Android and iOS. The free version of the app is a full featured demo (with save and export functions disabled). The matching desktop version for Mac or PC is fully functional (including save and export),  however with no technical support.  That said, the developer provides a comprehensive manual as well as a number of tutorial videos for using the app. 

Of course there are limitations,  but here's a taste of what you can do. (for free!)

This is a little track I created using Caustic. I was just experimenting with the instruments, effects mixer and sequencer features. If you have heard some of my other music, you may recognize the feel. This track was actually first, before I learned anything about music production.

Excusing the amateurish overuse of reverb, you can tell this is more than just a toy. I played all the musical ideas into the tracks using my MIDI keyboard via my USB audio interface. The biggest downer is there is currently no audio recording in this app. However, I think you can creatively use another SingleCell app to record audio and combine the resulting WAV files into Caustic. Since I decided to go ahead and purchase Ableton Live, I did not experiment any further with this app. However, I would expect that this app meets the needs of most beginning home music producers. I think the graphical interface makes it easy to create decent sounds on the several available instrument (which are called "machines" in this app). And one machine called "Modular" provides a unique workspace for additional creative sound design flexibility.

I could tell you a lot more about this app, but you would have so much more fun using it yourself. So go check it out and make some music! And when you're done come back and tell us about it.