Making music with a mobile phone? It’s not only possible – with an app like this one, called Spitfire – it’s great fun, even for those without much training in music, electronic or otherwise. All it takes is a good ear and the few minutes of practice to master this clever piece of software.

In technical terms, Spitfire, from Lionear Ltd., puts a four-track, loop-based audio recording and mixing setup in the palm of your hand. Translation: You can use it to record your own short sequences of beats or notes – a spoon tapped rhythmically against a water glass, for instance, or chords strummed on a guitar – and layer these loops on top of each other to produce something that resembles, more or less, the kind of groove-based music typically played in nightclubs and over the radio.

Spitfire uses your Nokia phone’s built-in microphone, or the one in the headphone cable, to record the sounds of nature, musical instruments, or snippets of recordings coming from any loudspeaker. The app also includes a small library of its own pre-recorded rhythm, bass, and melody tracks. All of these are available for mixing and matching as you like.

Depending on your rhythmical talents, the results can get quite funky, moving feet to tap and heads to bob. We’ve had a great deal of fun playing with this app, recording everything from an old blues harmonica to vocal beatbox effects to pencils played on a tabletop. As avant garde composer John Cage realized many years ago, music is to be found everywhere, even in silence – just use your ears.

Spitfire’s pre-recorded loops range from a handful of Bass lines (with names like JuJu, Funky, and Rumpubasso) to Beats (Formula, Jumi, Hidas, and House, for instance) to Lead melodies (House, Natty, and Neurotic are some of the choices). These are useful for providing a strong foundation for your own noodling – or, you can layer these loops together and create some quite professional-sounding tracks right off the bat. (A user manual, in PDF format, is available for viewing here.)

Spitfire’s graphical interface is quite straightforward. It shows four tracks, each one offering controls for volume, playback (which can be toggled on and off, to help isolate loops from each other), and recording. There’s also a small waveform window for each track, where you can see a graphical sketch of a track’s audio amplitude during recording or playback. At the top of the screen is a master volume control, a start-stop control, and a beats-per-minute controller.

To record a first track, just select or touch its corresponding REC button. It will automatically play the steady clicking of a metronome to guide your sound-making. (There’s a pop-up menu where, beforehand, you can adjust the speed of this metronome as well as choose to have it play continuously through your recording of a track or only for an introductory measure or two.) And now, keeping to this underlying beat – or not, as you choose – you can make your own sounds.

Alternatively, you can use a pop-up menu to choose a pre-recorded loop – take your pick – and layer three more loops on top of it. These pre-recorded loops are rhythmically strong – power chords, funky bass lines, etc. – and may be just what you need to get into the mood.

Now, you can repeat this procedure with three additional tracks. Spitfire makes it easy to have any or all of the three other tracks play through the phone’s speaker or headphones while you work on a fourth one, no matter if those tracks are pre-recorded loops or your own. And it’s easy to re-record selected loops, as well.

As you rework tracks and evolve a composition, you can save a copy of it at any time, using either an existing name or a new one. Later, you can return to this version and work again on any or all of its components loops. The volume of each loop is adjustable, and so is their collective volume when played as a track. What’s more, a master timing control enables a track, to be sped up or slowed down, but be warned, this will alter their pitch, too.

And once you like a piece enough to “publish” it as a sound file, that’s easy enough, too. The app will just ask you how many times you’d like to have it repeated. The music you’ve made will be rendered in 128Kbps AAC-formatted audio, ready for use as a ringtone or for posting up on Lionear’s Spitfire website, where it will be available for the world to hear.

Given the limited hardware it’s running on, Spitfire is certainly an impressive piece of software. It can produce some real, compelling music, virtually anywhere in the world. That said, we’d still like to see some additional capabilities, such as an Undo button, for returning to the previous version of a loop. Also, the ability to record new loops on top of a prevous recording, thus making it possible, in effect, to work with more than four loops.

For now, Spitfire runs only on S60 3rd Edition phones, like Nokia’s N95, but Lionear is working on an S60 5th Edition version that will be released shortly. As they like to say in the music biz, stay tuned.