So, why wait around?   I've actually already got about 5 pieces of music that I recorded in the last two months or so that I want to share.  (Let's be clear about the sharing part.  You are welcome to download and play this music, and share it for free with whomever you want.  What you aren't allowed to do is to sell it to someone else, or distribute it for profit.  If you distribute it for free, you must represent that the music was written and recorded by Bruce Baldwin. You're not allowed to represent either the composition or the recording as being your own.  Got it?)

So the first piece is titled "I Was An Infinitely Hot and Dense Dot," named after the Mark Leyner story (my favorite work of his).  The instrumentation is very straightforward for me: Guitar, Bass, Drums, and nothing else.   The way this music came about was like this:  I friend of mine was giving me hard time about the quality of the drum sound on previous recordings of mine.  In fact, he was so low as to suggest that I use electronic drums, rather than acoustic!  Unthinkable!  So, I set out to get a better drum sound.  I have a very large drum kit, a Pearl Export 7-piece kit (that's 5 toms, kick, snare) that I've had since about 1992.  In the past, since I didn't have the right mikes to mike everything on this big kit up close,  I would use a stereo pair of dynamic mikes about 4 feet away, plus a condenser mike up close on the kick drum.  For this recording, I decided to put a close mike on the snare and hi-hat, a close mike on the kick, and play no other drums.  I recorded about ten minutes of various "grooves" to see if it would sound good.  It did!  Because I had used no cymbal and no toms, I added a few crashes and a couple of simple tom fills from samples I had laying around.

As is my custom, I chopped up the drum recording into a bunch of loops, between 1 and 4 bars long, using Cool Edit Pro.  Then I strung some of the loops together in Sonar.  For some reason, at that point I thought I should use a big fat synth sound for a bass line.  I have a few different freebie synth "plugins," and I don't recall at this moment which one I used.  I programmed a simple bass line that matched the drums.  After having some synth bass and drums down, I started improvising on acoustic guitar (Ovation).  I actually recorded the melody line that ended up on the song with the acoustic.  This caused me to restructure the piece around the melody. 

I suppose I could have stopped there, with acoustic guitar, synth bass, and drums, but somehow I knew there was a bit more potential.  So, I rerecorded the acoustic guitar with distorted electric guitar (Guild Bluesbird) using wah-wah.  This seemed to do the trick.  I'm proud to say that the "solo" guitar sections were done on the first take of each.  The lead melody parts, however, took more than a few takes to get the feel I wanted.   I wisely did away with the synth bass, and played the same parts with the actual bass guitar.

I really liked the results, which made me want to start to record a "rock" album, and that's what turned into this virtual CD online.   Please let me know what you think.