M a k e r

Solar-Powered Studio

Bruce Baldwin’s DIY desert dream. By Charles Platt

Photography by Kyle George

Drive a couple hundred miles east from Los Angeles along Interstate 40, and you enter the high desert of Northern Arizona, where each small town is separated from the next by 30 or 40 miles of wilderness. Take an exit past an extinct volcano named Picacho Butte, and you find yourself on a rutted dirt road winding among junipers and red rocks. There’s no power out here, no phone lines, and no water. The primary residents are rattlesnakes and jackrabbits — yet when you turn onto another road that’s barely a track, you find, of all things, a solar-powered recording studio.

Audio quality that might have cost $1 million 20 years ago can be bought for maybe $10,000 today. Instead of laying down a 64-track master using Ampex tape decks the size of cooking stoves, you save to a hard drive. Mixing, EQ, and effects can be done with software, and by collaborating through

the web, a bass player in Los Angeles can add a track to a beat that was recorded in New York — or in the Arizona wilderness. Even out here, a cellular connection enables internet access at 1.5Mbps. That’s fast enough to swap .wav files.

Bruce Baldwin didn’t foresee all this when he started building his little studio, but he’s not surprised. What other people regard as happy coincidences, he sees as “symbiotic catalysm.” He insists that “if you have a specific purpose and are pursuing it with a passion, you will be drawn to people, material — and most importantly, knowledge — to make it occur. I have minimal construction abilities, but by relying on the structure itself to guide me through every step of the process, everything fit exactly the way it was supposed to.”

Formerly a technician and field engineer for a now-defunct major defense contractor, Baldwin

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