Okay, so here's my effort to balance out a few too many droney, spacy tracks in a row. Track fourteen is nothing but ROCK - guitar, bass, and drums! I'm not saying it will lighten the mood of the Virtual CD at all, but I think it's a welcome contrast to all the synthesis....
Download Track Fourteen: Clamorous
This track was built on drums that I actually recorded back in August. I'd recently purchased a new double bass drum pedal, and was giving it a workout... Once upon a time, back in the early 90's, I'd tried the double-kick thing and determined that I just wasn't all that great at it. ... |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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This music has been in process for about a month, and has gone through some big transformations. It's basically cut from the same cloth as some of the other recent tracks, such as "Bleak" and "Speaking in Tongues." I listened to all my recent music in the car a few days ago and wondered what exactly it said about my state of mind... In fact, it was all sounding so much the same to me, that I made some big changes to this track after I thought it was already finished.
I think it came out better as a result. Just about all of the guitar was ... |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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I started this short quartet piece earlier this year. For some reason, I was obsessed for a short time with quintuplets. That is to say, five beats over four. I noticed that they show up pretty infrequently in music, but they're actually kind of fun and interesting to hear. I realized one day that I could play quintuplets on drums, playing five beats on the snare drum against four beats on the bass drum. After that, I started thinking about melodic ideas that might work with that rhythm. The melodies I came up with were actually quite nice.
Download Precipice (Part ... |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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| Hi there. It's been a while, I know. So today, I offer you three downloads for the price of one! Actually, the price here is always free, so it's hard to improve on that. Speaking of which, have you noticed how all these people like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails and so on have made the news in the past year or so for offering their music as free downloads? Oh, so revolutionary of them? Well, tell your friends who was way ahead of the curve! That's right, brucebaldwin.net offered new music for free before any of them. And I'm still ... |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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| This past weekend, I decided to once again dig through the loops that have been accumulating on my looper pedal in my practice room. As I've said before, most of my guitar practice nowadays consists of creating loops and soloing over them, or just creating ambient textures. Because I save a lot of the loops I create when I'm improvising, there's a lot of stuff there. For the most part, I forget all about them immediately, so listening back periodically can be surprising! Mainly, they consist of drums and guitar, or just guitars, in layers and layers of loops on top of each other. Amongst the many ideas that I uncovered was the about the grimmest, saddest wash of sound that I've heard in a long time. A modal, unapologetically Fripp-ish Ebow thing. I don't have any recollection of creating it, but it must have been done sometime in the past couple of months.
Anyway, I was really surprised by the emotional depth of this particular loop, so I decided to create a composition out of it....
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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| I had heard many things about Slimbo Jones, a near-mythical figure, cloaked in mystery... I'd heard that he was a blues musician from the deep south; I'd heard that he was an idiot savant from the Far East; I'd heard that he was both very young and very old. All of it turned out to be true! Slimbo showed up one day with an old sampler under his arm, and recorded me playing a variety of sounds: drums, bass, guitar, xylophone, typewriter, and so on. His vintage equipment required that he couldn't record more than a few seconds at a time. In mono, no less! ... |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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Here's some all-new music for you for 2008... This is another one of those recordings that basically constructed itself. There was no forethought to the composition, but it all worked out it the end. Generally, I create the structure after the basic recording is done, then continue to add layers until it feels right to me.
Download Virtual CD Track Eleven: Speaking in Tongues
I started this track a couple of months ago, to test out the pizzicato string sounds that you hear at the beginning. They added the pizzicato sounds to Synful recently, so I had to try them. The part ... |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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It's a typical situation, you've heard it all before... obsessive compulsive musician moves to California, enjoys life, works with the big names, output slows to a crawl... But no! I refuse to allow this to be true! I actually have several near-completion things that I am trying to get done by the end of the year. Key word: trying.
Download Virtual CD Track Ten: What They Still Didn't Know
The track I said was nearly done in my last post is still not done... But some of it is part of this track! "What They Still Didn't Know" is actually a random collection of ... |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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Hello, information-starved readers. Here is a quick update to inform you of what's going on. Track Ten of the Virtual CD is near completion. I actually combined a couple of unfinished things from the last year, and added to it. It is built on a long droning guitar loop, the kind I enjoy creating for my own relaxation, with layers of percussion and so on. Some of the percussion and some of the guitar that I used was from loops I created while practicing (they all get saved). I also sampled Christina's voice and chopped it up. There are absolutely ... |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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So, I thought I'd take a break from the "Gus" music to bring you a new track for the Virtual CD! It's been a while, and I need to bring some balance back to my musical life. I've had a ton of fun this year playing looped guitar and drum music, but that's just between me, the walls, and my neighbors. I decided to jump start myself by revisiting some of my unfinished recordings. Oh, yes, there are way too many of those! And usually, there are good reasons why they get left unfinished...
"What Lay Hidden" is a track I actually started last year, ... |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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I am happy to say that I have just completed my fourth piece for "Gus." I arranged it for a huge orchestra with an overgrown string section, ominous brass, insistent percussion, and lurking woodwinds. I have successfully turned a 45 second keyboard demo into a three minute orchestral monstrosity. The original was in a whole-tone scale, an old favorite of mine, so I enjoyed hammering it out in that tonality. All along the way, my computer has fought against me tirelessly, and in so many inventive ways, but I have prevailed! My nightmare for the past week has been clicks and pops and buzzes and ... |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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Hello Friends,
I have been so busy doing so many things, yet I have shared so little on this blog! I have completed my third piece for "Gus," and I am hard at work on the fourth. He seems to be very happy with the results. Needless to say, writing orchestration takes up a whole lot of the creative brainpower and time, hence the overwhelming silence on this end. Sorry about that. I just updated the sound card on my system, and hope to have some of my own music to share with you again soon.
Here is something a bit different for ... |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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Dearest reader, I am still out here. So many things have happening for the past month that have prevented me from working on music! I have now officially moved to Aliso Viejo, California, and I am digging my way out of all the boxes and debris. The majority of my instruments still need to be retrieved from a friend's closet. It's quite discouraging, but I should have my act together in the next couple of weeks. It's especially concerning to me that I haven't been working on the Gus music, but I talked to him on the phone, ... |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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| Hey, I'm still here! Time flies. I have been hard at work on the music of "Gus" for the past few weeks, and I'm happy to say that I completed the first piece (for now). The piece, as it was sent to me, was about minute long, with a nice oboe melody over some rhythmic and ever-changing string parts. I think the string parts may have been played on some kind of guitar synth, possibly using an arpeggiator. Maybe it's just keyboard. I'm not really sure, but there was a lot going on! I went through the rather painstaking process of transcribing it note-for-note, ... |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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So, here's the music I've been working on for the past several weeks. I really have spent way too much time on it, but hopefully the results are enjoyable. Whether or not this track belongs on the "Virtual CD" is anybody's guess. It's just strictly an orchestral piece. I think of it as the journey of a very simple melody across a variety of landscapes of key and rhythm.
Click here to download "Hopeful Transitions."
As I mentioned in my last post, this was an exercise for me in using the whole orchestra rather than just ... |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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| So, big things are afoot in my musical life! My submission of "Wishes Fulfilled" yielded unexpectedly positive results, and I am flabbergasted (in a good way)! The title turned out to be prophetic. I'm not yet going to share on the Internet the name of the "interested party," whom I am now working with, but some of you already know. Let's just call him "Gus." Gus is one of my big musical influences (for many, many years), and he contacted me directly to establish a creative relationship. I've spent the last week or so in a pleasant state of confusion. Needless to say, I won't be posting my work with Gus here, but I'm sure I'll have plenty of unrelated stuff to continue to post. |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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Okay, so it's been pointed out to me that it's been a while since I posted anything. You might be thinking, what kind of 'obsessive' musician goes a month without producing anything new? Well, that fact is that I've been doing a lot of music, but I haven't completed any new recordings. I have actually been practicing quite a lot with the looping technique that I referred to when I first started this blog. It gives my guitar playing a workout, and I think it lowers my blood pressure at the same time! I have a bunch of new ideas from that process, that I ... |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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| Let me start out by saying that I had no intention of doing anything even vaguely political when I started this track, or even when I started this blog. In fact, the music here was mostly finished before I added the President's voice to it... I often have this desire to incorporate spoken voices into my music. I started working on this last week, around the time of the election, so I suppose that's how this idea got into my head, and took over the music I was working on. I was thinking how incredibly ... |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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| So, I took a bit longer between tracks this time. In between, I actually started two different things that are in an unfinished place right now, that I will probably return to next. I was really just trying to make sure that I wasn't getting into a rut. Track Seven is a little bit different from the earlier tracks in that it's a bit heavier in the guitar department. If you're here looking for chamber music, you may want to scroll down the page a bit. It's written in the same mode as Canine Helicopter Anxiety, which was the string sextet in an earlier post. I still don't actually know the name of this mode; it's really not a proper mode at all. But I like it. Please click "more" for the link to the MP3. |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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| Fear not, loyal readers, more new music is on the way! After stepping away to recalibrate, I swung the dial all the way over from "Chamber Music" to "Metal," and then back halfway again! |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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| So, one of the main problems with obsessing about writing and recording music every day is that I push myself to do something even when the inspiration is not there. A lot of times, that's actually a successful approach; simply messing around will give me the spark of an idea, and away I go. Other times, I just spin my wheels in the mud. The past couple of weeks have been like that. I've been going over and going over the same idea, and it hasn't been going anywhere. And it's another piece for strings, when I really want to be recording something a bit more "rock" sounding. The best thing for me to do in these cases is to take a few steps back, and not even think about music for a few days. So that's what I'm doing. Or trying to do.
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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| I called this track "Persistence" because I kept coming back to it to try to make it better. I still don't know if I'm entirely happy with it, but I've decided that's it's time to throw it out into the world, and move on! As of yesterday, in fact, I had decided that I didn't want to use it at all. I listened again today, and decided that I should keep it, since I spent a lot of time on it, and I think there is some good stuff in there. I will probably like it a lot better after I have some time away from it. Please tell me your opinion. Please click "more" for the link to the MP3. |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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| What, you say, track six? There is no track five! Well, hold your horses, there is a track five, but it needs some modifications before I'm ready to upload it. Since "Road Rage" is all strings, and "Dance of the Directionless" ends with the strings, I'd like to keep the other track in between. I'm almost certainly going to change the order when all the tracks are done anyway.
SO, much as I expected when I started out to record a "guitar-oriented rock" CD, I have already veered completely off course. I am pretty impulsive when it comes to music, and my interests are all over the place. This track has no guitar, and its association to rock music is tenuous at best. It's a string quartet with drums and bass. Of all the great music that's been using the format of string quartet plus drum and bass, there's... um, well, I can't think of anything. Maybe somebody can tell me. It actually seems like an ensemble that ought to be in the regular arsenal of the modern composer. I like it. |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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| So, the stated purpose of this blog is to write about the creative process. So far, I've just been giving you tracks after they were already done. It's time to write about the creative process while it's in process! If this is your first time here, and you want to hear some music, please scroll down and skip this entry!
For me, creative inspiration often comes from unlikely sources. A lot of my best music has started from a stupid idea, like a stolen sample or a recorded noise from a household object. Or maybe a melody with words about penguins or dogs. I take that stupid seed of an idea, and build something on top of it, then end up removing the original thing I started with. |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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| The fourth track is a radical departure from the first three in that it's actually in a major key! I like minor keys so much that major keys are somewhat of a rarity for me. The major seventh chord, however, is something I've been drawn to ever since I picked up a guitar. This track also features Synful Orchestra a bit more prominently. Please click "MORE" for the link to the MP3. |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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| Okay, so I have a feeling this one will take me a while to explain. For starters, this track is actually slightly older than the first two tracks I posted. The track was completed mid-June, but I probably started it in April or May. Technically, the track might not have belonged on the Virtual CD at all, but I feel like it fits very well as track three.
(Please click MORE for the download link) |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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Hey, I'm actually starting to get some traffic here! Thank you for taking a chance and visiting. This all probably makes more sense if you start from the bottom. So, start scrolling down!
I'll be posting some music later today, but here's a passing thought. While perusing my traffic reports, I have to comment that an older track of mine, Cat's Cradle, gets about ten hits a day! I have to think that somebody has it linked up somewhere, but I can't figure out where. If anybody knows, please tell me! A lot of the traffic on ascentmusiconline seems to ... |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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| Here's track two of my "Virtual CD." They are coming to you fast and furious right now because I need to upload what I've done during the last two months before I can start telling you about the present moment. This track is called "Just Stop Talking." The title is inspired by certain individuals in certain corporate environments who seem to like the sound of their own voice just a bit too much! |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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| 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?) |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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So, I've been working on some new instrumental music, and
trying to figure out what exactly to do with it. I play every instrument
that I can get my hands on: Guitar, Drums, Bass, Mandolin, Keyboard, etc.
I can write for orchestra, and use a variety of programs like Synful to
simulate strings, brass, woodwinds, etc. A lot of what I write and record
might be considered "progressive rock" by some, or "soundtrack
music" by others. I have created several instrumental CDs in the
past... What usually happens is that I end up selling or giving away ... |
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| Posted by Bruce Baldwin at | | | |
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