My favorite music software

I started using Caustic around when I started college. If memory serves, my first installation of it was actually the mobile version on a tablet I had bought for school. I don’t remember how I discovered it; it’s possible my brother discovered it first and I got it from him.

Caustic is a music-making program that gives you access to a set of built-in instruments and effects. The tools are all easy to use, but not necessarily as flexible or feature-packed as those in a professional DAW (digital audio workstation). For this reason, I sometimes describe Caustic as a “toy DAW”.

In my opinion, that’s not a negative; it’s one of its greatest strengths. It’s way more fun and easy to make musical sketches in Caustic than in any other program I’ve used. It doesn’t require any special configuration or setup, there’s less friction, and generally, things feel very easy to change or tweak as you work on them.

The free mobile version of Caustic doesn’t allow saving your music, but the desktop version was free and did allow saving, so I switched over to using that pretty soon. There’s a little friction in the UI on desktop because it was designed for a touch screen, so you end up having to click for everything, while I’m used to having keyboard shortcuts. But once you get used to the workflow, I still find it easier than a lot of things.

Using the desktop version of Caustic on my various computers over time, I built up a big library of little sketches and songs. To this day, I still find it a fertile ground for incubating ideas, as well as for reconnecting to the pure joy of making music just for fun.

Every so often, I will scroll back through my old songs (which I’ve kept around since college) and bask in the hits of nostalgia from all these inspirations I had at different times in my life. Observing how I’ve changed and refined my approach to putting these tracks together reminds me of how much Caustic has helped me grow as a musician.

I wanted to get back into making things on Caustic more consistently last year, so I made a page called Daily Jingle on here and posted songs for about a week or so. After that, I left it behind, although maybe I’ll change it to Weekly Jingle or something. Having some kind of requirement for myself to be creative regularly really does make a difference in my rate of good ideas.

If you want to use Caustic, it’s available for iOS still, but the Android app is gone from the store, and the old website is no longer accessible except by archive. But you can still download the desktop version there! Personally, I just copy around the same version of it onto every new computer I get, along with my library of songs and presets, since I know it’s not likely to be updated any more.

Do you have a favorite music software? Do you have another piece of creative software you enjoy playing with? What do you like about it? Have you used Caustic before? Let me know your thoughts at my Ctrl-C email: gome ​@ ​ctrl-c.club.