I am super excited about this project because I upgraded my music amazingly! I’ve created music in an app on my phone called Caustic 3. I’ve mentioned it before and I have only gone further down the rabbit hole of music composition with this app. Okay so here is what I’ve done I found a music producer named Michael Henggeler who I’ve gotten to know and found to have real talent! I approached Michael with the goal to “upgrade” one of my songs from Caustic to a higher fidelity instruments. I’ll explain..

Caustic 3

Caustic 3 is a music creation tool inspired by rack-mount synthesizers / samplers rigs. Everything is real-time and optimized for mobile devices. Create your rack by adding up to 14 machines from a choice of: * Subsynth – Virtual analog subtractive synthesizer. * PCMSynth – Multi-sample wave synthesizer.

Caustic 3 has been my goto workspace to get into music since 2017 and I have had a blast getting to know everything in this app. The instruments sound great and have so much variety and the app flows so well from song to pattern to assembly. This is a tightly packed app chock full of features and it is no secret that this program is popular on mobile devices. And the PC version is Free! Plus Caustic save files transfer seamlessly from PC to phone which makes this app an extremely valuable $10 investment!

My song “Information War”

Ok, onward to my project. I made this song called Information War during the height of the pandemic in 2020. It was in July and I spent a lot of my time conversing with my friend Clark who is a seasoned DJ and music school alumni. He got the most torture from hearing me experiment and play with assembling patterns and songs, but he was overall really encouraging. and we talked about all sorts of things as I mused in this app. Clark actually inspired this song because he loved to expound in detail about conspiracies and insights into what “they” are doing. I listened to his ideas and statements and understood that the root cause of a lot of the things he was talking about was because of media outlets and their biases. I used that sentiment and voluntold Clark to record a sample of him saying a few words and voila! Information War was created!

The problem with Caustic 3 is just the fact that it was designed for phones and is amazing for that. However, a professional music production program like Ableton is home to much higher fidelity plug-ins. Since I knew pretty much nothing about music composition and didn’t want to invest too much too soon, I opted for Caustic instead. But I wasn’t going to abandon 3 years of music creation and start fresh in Ableton. I’m too sentimental to do that! And I shared that sentiment with Clark who told me about MIDI

MIDI

Midi files are the most basic language that music and computers use to talk to each other and it’s been around for almost 40 years! Essentially midi notes use binary 1s and 0s to indicate whether notes are on or off. Combine that with a digital instrument which every audio production program uses including Caustic and you get a universal file that works with everything! kinda like a musical currency! Thanks Clark!

So what I did is I exported Information War as a MIDI file and sent it to the talented Michael Henggeler and he imported it into his epic music setup and got to work!

Fast forward about two months and I got the full version!!! And it sounds bloody amazing!

Now it’s only in draft form still but I wanted to share a comparison of what this pipeline can do!

And here ladies and gents is the upgraded version for this same section!!!!

I am elated with the result of the upgraded instruments and I’m happy that I found a pipeline that works for me. I can still work in Caustic without investing too much into a pricey setup and, through this workflow, achieves really incredible results from just a phone app! I can’t wait for the final result!

The Caustic version of Information War got published and found a home here: https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/1006065