"The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart." - Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Ya know as I was thinking about this article, I couldn't help but think about the nature of change. Sometimes it's forced upon us suddenly and unexpectedly, other times it slowly but surely edges us to new and uncomfortable directions. In some ways, the shuttering of single cell software was both of these for me. Single Cell Software created Caustic 3, a "toy" DAW for mobile phones. For you to understand my connection to this program, i'll need to tell you a story first.
I've always had a passing interest in doing music. But I never had the patience for full instrument lessons. In around 2010, I found an app called pixitracker, which I convinced my mom to install on her phone. I was pretty sucky at it, but being able to draft up ideas at a moments notice was pretty cool. I didn't really stick with pixittacker that much though, and it was always sorta just a fun pass time. Fast forward to about 2016 when I discovered Caustic 3. Coming from a mostly music tracker background, Caustic 3 first felt like a bit of a whiplash. I quickly got acquainted with it's workflow, and found it far more intuitive than all the other mobile DAWs I'd tried. The time difference between having an idea and having a beat on the pattern editor of what I wanted to make went from minutes to seconds as I fiddled with the DAW more and more. Mind you, remembered when I said I sucked at pixi tracker? I SUCKED at Caustic. Most of what I made in high school is C tier music at best. But strangely, I didn't really mind making the terrible beats. The work flow was so fun and freeing that it was honestly more fun and rewarding to interact with the software and to try to express myself in new ways. The ease of use put my head into a flow state, similar to what I feel in tetris or twinkle star sprites, where time basically stops, and the music begins to write itself.
Now not many people know this, but in 2016 my sophomore year of high school, I was extremely depressed. I had an English class, and my teacher absolutely hated me. She would single me out and make fun of me in many subtle ways in front of the whole class and to me directly. "My husband is black so i can't be racist to you".. why the fuck would you say that to a 16 year old? The homework she would give was busy work that I never was able to do right, and it took a huge toll on my mental health. There was so much wrong with that teacher, i ended up blocking most of it out. I don't like remembering that class. Not to mention I was doing cross-country at the time, and due to daily training that was not really good for my body, I'd arrive home every day in a state of total mental and physical exhaustion. My grades started to suffer, and I felt like I was nearing the end of my wits. Though I eventually did quit cross country running, the agony of that English class did stay for the rest of the school year. In order to cope with this, I'd spend numerous nights in the Caustic 3 DAW. Oftentimes, I'd stay up till 5AM on school nights just tinkering with Caustic with no regard for anything but making music. I can't tell you how many hours I spent in the DAW, but it was probably very unhealthy. I was absolutely addicted to it. By the time the school year ended, Caustic was a second home for me. Whenever I was feeling any sort of emotion at all, it would somehow render itself on my phone as a song in Caustic 3. Now by this time I still sucked at it. But I found a bit of a correlation between my emotional state and how hard I was willing to focus on creating good music (feeling bad = good music unfortunately). As you lot know, I have Autism and pretty extreme focus issues, and Caustic was one of the only things I could consistently conjure up hyperfocus to do the things I wanted to do. I wasn't diagnosed with anything then though, I kinda just buried all my hopes and dreams into the shitty beats I was making.
In many ways Caustic to me was an extension to my own body. It was a form of meditation that eased a lot of my stress. I felt more connected to myself when writing music in this mode than anything else I've ever done. Nevertheless, this bond did not completely last. Although my Caustic addiction persisted throughout high school and into college, I rarely ever got any constructive feedback on my music. And when I did - oh boy it was harsh. Writing music for 6 years in a bubble of raw unfiltered willpower will teach you how to express yourself in the realms you understand, though without critique, self or otherwise, you won't get better. My music was odd, mushy, and dissonant. I opted for hip hop samples and pads that barely went together, but crafted an extremely dank vibe that I personally craved but others seemed to find bizarre at best. After I landed the gig writing music for RPGs, I needed to clean up my act and fast. I needed sample bank of consistent quality, and Caustic being a toy DAW without VST support, did not really deliver on that front. After months of trial and error, I eventually settled on using a Yamaha MU 2000 ad my main synthesizer of choice, and using Renoise as the program to send data to the synth to control it going forward. As much as I would have wanted to use Caustic instead of Renoise, Caustic does not have MIDI out, and the workflow for making usable MIDI files in Caustic (writing tracks using a shitty sound font, exporting the midi file, editing/cleaning the midi file again in jazz midi sequencer, running through cleaned-up midi thru the synth and back into my audio interface) leaves a lot to be desired. Along with the music theory and other things I did to fix my composition style, this essentially made Caustic neigh irrelevant and most of my music making endeavors. I still do use it for generating sound effects for games, as the built in synthesizer are still quite powerful. Although Caustic was not free, it was apparent that the developer abandoned the program sometime in 2018. Later on, the website for single cell software was hacked, and in some browsers (firefox) the domain name redirected the user to malicious software. Activity on the forums began to slow down, and as of today in 2024, the website is completely down and Caustic is removed from the android play store. I still have the old APK and unlock file for the app, but neither will install on my S24 Ultra.
Now I get it. The android phone architecture changed and I can't run the app on my new phone. But almost feel like this should not be the case. How often do you run apps that are older than 5 years on your PC? Pretty often, I'd wager! I think the android operating system should have a compatibility layer for things like this. Furthermore, the API as it is controlled by Google changes far far far too often. Most of the applications I write are not so demanding that they require the newest phone, and now Google is punishing developers for supporting older API versions by making them inaccessible on modern android, even if the app would have run fine otherwise. From a software and hardware perspective, developers and users are pressured into updating frequently, to a degree that I belive is unsustainable. I'm not a Luddite, and I don't think technology should stay the same forever. But I do think that backwards compatibility and legacy support should be made a priority to extend the life of our technology. Of course things will change about our operating systems, but I suppose they change way to fast for me, especially on mobile phones. There was a commercially released game my company made and released just last December, and I can't even install the app on my S24! When is enough enough?
Caustic 3 was and is abandonware. The developer will never release an update, and aside from some heresy and fan projects, the entire Caustic ecosystem has been snuffed out. Although my relationship with this program wasn't the best, and although Caustic had some stability issues among other things, there was an empowering feeling I got from working with it that I've yet to find anywhere else. If I had an idea for some song or a remix I wanted to do, I could conjure up a rough sketch in 10 minutes or less. The expression I was able to pull out of this app was invigorating, and I really really enjoyed my time with it.
Nothing is really stopping me from using this app today. I still have my old phone, and Caustic has a PC port which runs just as well as the mobile version. Why the eulogy then? The truth is, I wanted to grow with this program. There's still so much that can be done with it that I've yet to figure out. Ever since the its abandonment, I knew I was digging myself into a hole by continuing to use the software. And I guess this blog post is about that fear. What's the point of pouring everything into learning a tool that's eventually going to become unusable? If a tool is FOSS, I could at least understand, since you could contribute to the project's source code and keep it alive. But a lot of us creators know that there's often no comparison between the commercial software and the open source counterparts (the former is often much more fully featured and better supported than the latter). Why not? Caustic was commercially supported and it died. Cakewalk was commercially supported and it died. My point is this: I LIKE Caustic. The UI was unique and properly designed for very fast access. Now that it's abandonware, there's no grunted that it will continue working tomorrow, and I've since had to relearn another DAW in order to continue to grow as a musician. There's a lot of value that we creatives get out of stability — once you learn the tool, you can focus on just creating the art you want to make. I'm finding that it's harder and harder to find that stable creative environment, especially in the mobile space. I think that Google and other mobile platform holders should respect their developers and respect their customers by treating their systems like managed ecosystems instead of a grassland to be grazed and trampled to death time and time again. Programs solve problems for people, giving developers a stable ground to build on will make it easier to build, maintain, and support everyone long term. In the meantime, I'll be prioritizing FOSS when possible.
Alright no more venting. Just music from here on out. Thanks for coming to my ted talk!!!!
Alright this isn't the end, I'm actually going to bundle some songs together to talk about genres. It will make sense, trust.
I'm realizing that this is more about a lot of the music I wrote with it rather than the program itself. Notation is super duper important to the way I like to craft sounds, so I suppose it's also a goodbye to these styles of composition as well. Not to say that I stopped writing music, far from it actually! It's just that my process has changed so much that I feel like my style has gone into a very different direction. I also think that there's already plenty of videos on Caustic on youtube.. (some by yours truly!), but not enough yapping about the silly stuff i guess. Kinda like my silly doodles webpage I made, I wanted something like that for the music I write too. I quite literally have >1000 of these tracks that I never really spent the time in sharing with people, so I figured now is as good of a time as ever to finally get it all out of the way. Furthermore, I start a new job tomorrow, and I doubt I'd have the time to do all of this in the future.
I realized I don't have nearly as much time to update this page as I thought I did. I have dozens of tracks I want to share, but time toils on and is taking me with it. Bon voyage caustic! Don't be a stranger!
probably still gonna come back to the DAW from time to time.. there's so much more I want to do with it :(... anyway what mobile DAW do you guys use?