Colin Bracken

Once again, this record was composed and engineered by myself. The genesis of this project began with the launch of Eventide’s Music Mouse plugin earlier this year. Music Mouse was originally developed by Laurie Spiegel in the early 1980s as a compositional tool and this plugin updated it to have the capability to interact with modern DAWs and audio plugins. Laurie is an early inspiration of mine and I was immediately intrigued to hear this tool had been re-released.

The majority of tunes on this record were composed almost 100% with the Music Mouse plugin. Some exceptions were included, with a bit of additional improvisation being done on keyboard at times, but I mostly stuck to improvisational lines that I could cut and use as rhythms or leave in entirety as a solo instrument. Lots of the songs also featured multiple MIDI instruments being played by the Music Mouse all at once; the ability to assign each of the four voices to four separate channels meant I could orchestrate my instruments all at once.

https://www.twine.net/signin

https://www.twine.net/signin

This is my personal project that I worked on between May and July of 2025. The goal of this project was to create an album which showcased my versatility as a composer and musician while maintaining a consistent track listing that flowed better than my previous albums.

Creation of the album was done entirely through Ableton Live 12 on my home Mac. The instrument plugins I used were Roland’s Juno-60 emulation, G-Force’s AXXESS and OB-X emulation, UAD’s Opal wavetable synth and Minimoog emulation and Ableton’s Sampler plugin for round-robin sampling. The actual instruments I recorded were my Sterling Stingray 4-string bass and my PRS SE CE 24 Standard electric guitar. These were recorded direct through my SSL2 interface, although it’s important to note that the bass was sent through my Laney BCC TCF bass compressor pedal first.

When approaching composition for the album, I largely started through recording improvised parts on the keyboard first. I could then decide in Ableton whether to keep these parts as is or edit them. Editing could be something as small as correcting notes to be in time or as substantial as chopping parts of performances to duplicate a part multiple times and extending chord sequences. For an example of a substantial edit I did on the last track of the album, I sent the lead guitar part through a delay from Ableton called “PitchLoop89”, which is a stereo delay where you can manipulate the pitches and timing of the delayed signals in both channels, and time-stretched certain notes to attain a robotic, manipulated guitar sound.

With the abundance of instruments used on this album and generally how much louder it is than anything I’ve worked on prior, I also had to structure gain and apply compression, equalization and limiters to accommodate for the volume of each track. A lot of the compression on individual tracks were done using the LA-3, LA-2 and 1176 plugin emulations from UAD, while limiting, compression and equalization in the mastering process was accomplished through the use of Ableton’s limiter plugin and UAD’s emulation of the API 2500 bus compressor and channel strip respectively. For some tracks like Designation, I had to automate the levels of tracks in order to avoid signal peaks and distortion on the main master track. Metering on the master was done using Youlean’s Loudness Meter 2 plugin to ensure the short-term loudness was at -8 LUFS integrated and true peak max was at -1.0 dB for each track.

Prior to joining the band as a bassist, I was initially asked to help them record their single “Someday” at Dreamhouse Studios. We recorded the acoustic guitars, drums and vocals over the course of 3 hours.

I was responsible for coordinating with the group prior to entering the studio to set up when we would record, what mics we would record with, the outboard equipment we would use and what we would focus on recording for that session, and setting up the equipment in the studio for the recording session, including the recording console, microphones, patchbay, and outboard equipment, and operating said equipment for the band while we recorded.