Bringing Songs to Life in Colby’s New Mixdown Studio
A new Gordon Center studio gives students the chance to explore what’s possible
Energetic guitar riffs and rich, melodic vocals seemed to shimmer and hang in the air of the Mixdown Studio as Maeve Sebastian ’28 leaned into a microphone to record another take of the heartfelt pop song she’d written.
The singer kept on going, performing take after take of the catchy, propulsive tune in the studio tucked into the lower level of the Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts, until Alex Fulton, a sound engineer, producer, and Jan Plan program instructor, heard what he was looking for.
“Whoo, that’s it—nailed it!” he exclaimed. “That was good. And I know that you’ve got another one in you that’s going to be great.”
It was the end of January, and students in the College’s new Music Production course had found their groove as they raced to finish writing, performing, and recording an original song. All seemed thrilled with the state-of-the-art recording studio that came online last semester.
“It’s been an awesome class,” said Bryn Kerslake ’27, a computer science and economics double major. He sat close to the audio mixing board with its many sliders and dials, kept an eye on the large monitors that showed the audio waves and digital effects that could be used to process the recorded sounds, and made adjustments with Fulton’s help.
A new course and a new ‘mixmaster’
The course filled up within three hours of opening for registration. Fulton added four more seats, which were filled within an hour, and in November and December, he fielded half a dozen requests a week from students asking if he could add them to the roster.
Fulton, who started working last fall on a contract basis for the College as the studio’s “mixmaster,” is pleased that so many students are eager to learn more about music production. He’s a trained audio engineer now based in Waterville who runs Fulton Street Media Group, a company that works with agencies and brands seeking original music, sonic identities, and more. He has a deep-seated interest in music’s relationship with memory and emotion and is producing a documentary about that.
He believes music, and music education, is a human right.
“Music should be something that’s accessible to everyone. It’s great to be able to share that here at Colby,” he said. “I think my favorite part about working here is that there are a lot of people who are bringing other interests and disciplines to the music program. There’s a student who’s doing a project that’s music and ecology, or music and environmental policy, and that’s really exciting.”
The College’s Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts, which opened in October 2023 as one of the most advanced and innovative performing arts facilities in New England, is helping to make those connections, and musical accessibility, possible. Among its studios, production, and classroom spaces is the Mixdown Studio, which features both a live performance room and a control room.
“The acoustics are phenomenal,” Fulton said of the studio and other spaces in the building, too. “All the rooms sound so good.”
The studio is wired to record audio from the 300-seat Performance Hall and other spaces, and among his duties will be to record student concerts in the Performance Hall.
“It’s really exciting,” he said. “I think the thing that gets me excited is the students going out of their way to use the studio, and doing things that are unconventional. They’re looking to explore and push the boundaries of what they know is possible.”
‘An exclusive club’
Last semester, Fulton started a studio manager program to train students to be able to record and engineer student projects. During Jan Plan, students got a soup-to-nuts crash course in creating, capturing, manipulating, and preserving music.
Although Fulton initially questioned if he had been too ambitious, the students met the challenge, and over the course of the month, they began to think and act like music engineers. Some spent late nights in the studio working on projects and troubleshooting issues and then woke up early the next morning to start all over again.
“You guys are now part of an exclusive club,” Fulton told them. “This is just part of it, and it won’t be the last time you do it. Troubleshooting until forever, and then waking up early and hitting it again. You could have given up and just waited for someone else to come and solve it. But the fact that you didn’t is so awesome.”
For Cecilia Treadwell ’26, a biology major with a concentration in neuroscience, figuring out how the studio works is a big part of why she enrolled in the course. The singer-songwriter is in a band on campus and has long dreamed of recording her own music.
“This has been the best Jan Plan I’ve taken at Colby. It’s opened so many doors for me, just to know that I can come back here anytime, even during the semester, and record a song,” she said, adding that she would love to keep doing music in the future. “I think we can get very caught up in this obsession of being pre-med, pre-law, pre-this, pre-that. I think this class has really reminded me to take a step back and do what I love to do.”
Making a song come to life
In the course, students broke up into groups that would each write and produce a song. Treadwell’s group decided to use a song she started writing last year called “Wildest Haze,” a bluesy, jazzy love song that started with her lyrics and melody and grew from there. She got together with Ivan Knoepflmacher ’25, a psychology major, who played the piano on the track and added his ideas to the song. All members of her band, Exit 127, also were part of the recording.
“It becomes a very collaborative process, which is really fun,” Treadwell said. “It’s building a community and working on this one thing together and having a tangible product that we’ve produced together, which is really cool.”
Zoe Paley ’28, a first-year student planning to major in biology with a concentration in cell and molecular biology, took the reins for the engineering of “Wildest Haze.” Although she didn’t initially know a lot about Pro Tools, the software program used for sound recording, editing, and mastering, she found she had a knack for learning by doing. If something didn’t sound quite right, she’d fiddle with the controls until it sounded better.
“I kind of just figured it out,” Paley said. “I think the biggest problem we have is there are too many options. We have that problem in our group. We need to entertain every possible piano sound and every possible guitar sound. We’re perfectionists.”
Before too long, the students found themselves spending many hours a day in the studio. They loved it. It didn’t feel like school, or like homework. It felt like something else: using problem-solving and creativity to make something beautiful with friends who feel the same.
