The Art of the Mix Tape

I think I'm going to give this a shot and impart my knowledge and experience in this matter (besides, this gives me something to do while making a tape for a fellow Everythingian and another friend in Boston). I've been collecting records since high school and have made countless tapes for friends, lovers, and random people. The most common comment I get is: "Great tape!" I got my masters in tape mixology.

So, as the popular children's classic goes...

In the beginning...

As is explained in "High Fidelity", the most important part of a mix tape is the first three songs. You need to be able to grab the listener and keep their interest without, as it's so eloquently put, blowing your wad. A good formula to follow is "start slow, take it up, bring it down." While this seems like a major limitation, there are a couple of ways to have a good beginning on every tape you make.

• You're going to want to set aside five hours per tape. Yup. No, really. I'll break it down: on a 110 minute tape, it typically takes me the length of the tape, plus thirty-five minutes per-side (to allow for album fumbling, sample searching, equipment hitting, and the like), and then you have to make the tape case and listen to your piece of art. YMMV, and I'm paying more attention to the cassette deck counter than the clock, but it takes longer than one would think.
• Always use high quality tapes. Always, unless you hate the person you're making the tape for. I usually use Maxell High Bias XL-II 110s, but I've gotten good use out of the TDK CD Power series. Fuji makes shit tapes. Sony's all right, but makes weird cases. The longevity and quality of the tape is worth the few extra bucks.
• Before you start, reset the counter on your tape deck and then fast forward through the tape. Make a note of what number the counter ends on. This is especially necessary on old style rolling counters that typically have no relation to how much time has passed (some measure feet, others meters. Both mean bollocks if you're trying to figure out if you can fit in that doubleplus cool live bootleg Wedding Present cover of Lou Reed's Satellite of Love), but you can never really trust tape measurements (sometimes I've gotten about six or seven extra minutes past what the outside packaging of a tape has told me).
• Begin a tape with a sample from a movie or a spoken word record. One of my personal favourites is "Charlie, remember what happened happened to the man who got everything he asked for..." bit from the end of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
• Use an upbeat opener, followed by something with a faster tempo and a driving bass line, then lead into the rest of the tape with something more similar to what the majority of your tastes are.
• Starting with a pleaser or a radio hit isn't selling out -- it's good advertising. Pretend your music taste is on trial, and the tape you're making is your legal defense. Play to the jury by starting with what they'll like and slowly introducing your more unique elements later on. Of course, if you don't know what someone's particular tastes are, anything goes.
• Make sure your songs lead into each other. You're not trying to throw curveballs here -- you're trying to get someone to bop their head like they're an extra in a Volkswagen commercial.
• Allow yourself at least seven seconds of trailer silence at the beginning and end of each side of a tape. It's really more like three, but give yourself the safety of seven. Only losing your family to a pack of wild animals sucks more than having a song start in the middle of a beat or cut off in the middle of a final crescendo.

side a
------
I Know Sometimes a Man is Wrong -- David Byrne
King Deluxe -- Bows
Top Floor, Bottom Buzzer -- Morphine

The Meat

This could also be known as the "general tips" section, since from here on out there aren't any set rules. Here are some things that I do to keep things interesting or make my task as a tape maker easier.

• On a piece of scratch paper write down your playlist, including song title, artist name, and what time the song ends (which is helpful if you screw up somewhere and need to make some adjustments for the sake of time). Don't make your tape insert as you go: spend time on this after the tape is all made, otherwise it will look sloppy if you make a mistake or omit a song. I'll get to making the case later.
• Don't put the record level too high or too low. Try to avoid hitting peaks too often. Between -6 and 0 dBs is optimal, but don't worry if it peaks on bass hits.
• Go back and listen after the first few songs to make sure the recording level is okay.
• Take full advantage of your equipment. The best kind of system to make tapes on is a component system because all-in-ones usually don't have a record level and have shite for extra inputs. If your CD player has a fader, use that instead of the record level knob. If your tape deck has a mechanism that tests tape bias, use it. My setup includes a Technics turntable, Technics RS-TR575 dual stereo cassette deck, Sony CE525 CD player, and a Sony DE945 receiver, plus assorted Frankensteined components that've been found and repaired and broken again over the ages, and I have no complaints whatsoever about my system's performance.

• Vary the mood. This is the most important thing to remember. Bring things up as much as you bring 'em down. Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away. Explore the full range of your collection. Live free or die. Don't justify someone tossing your tape out the window of their car because it bored them. Just remember that a weirdly balanced tape can be just as hard to listen to. Do your best to swing your tape's moods in a calm and orderly fashion.
• The two sides, two tapes theory: there's a school of thought that likes to treat the end of a side as the end of a tape, which is largely a remenant from the pre-auto-reverse days. Most folks nowadays treat the entirety of a tape as a very long album. I meet these two schools of thought somewhere in the middle and give side A a decent ending, so as to entice the listener to venture forth into the musky jungles of Side B, and then give said Side B a punchy beginning tune.
• Never put the same band back to back. There are very few instances where this really fits, such as creating your own personal "best of". I'm all for peppering a current favorite band throughout a tape, but it just seems tacky to me to even have two songs off the same compilation or soundtrack next to each other on a tape, let alone two songs by the same group.
• Try to keep about three to five seconds between each song, unless you're trying to pull off something extra super cool like merging two different songs (one mix-tape moment that I was very proud of years ago involved leading Rusted Root tribal-type drum song into Big Bad Voodoo Daddy's "You And Me And The Bottle Makes Three Tonight (Baby)". This was in high school and done with no professional equipment, just a good sense of where the tape was positioned under the recording heads. Unfortunately, the tape itself is lost to the ages.) In no circumstance should you have more than seven seconds of dead air (except, of course, at the end of a side).
• A lot of mixers use a signature song or group. One friend of mine always put at least one Black Sabbath song on a tape because "chicks dig it", another friend puts tons of Guided By Voices on his tapes because "GBV fans give good head." Whatever. I usually try to include as much of the Athens scene as I can, but I usually get distracted by other records with shinier covers. I almost always remember to put on some REM, Vic Chesnut, or Japancakes, though. I'm also fond of using a little Lambchop to add a healthy bit of hazy twang to a mix. Basically, I like to hick shit up because, um, chicks dig it.
• This may seem kind of obvious, but cueing up an actual, vinyl record can really suck. A lot of the times, especially with 45's or seven inches, you have to worry about the annoying pop that occurs upon the needle's initial contact with the record. Nicer turntables have a cool servo-type mechanism that smoothly lowers the arm, but you have to have a pretty good eye for where the needle is going to land. I recommend playing through the last seconds of the song before the one you want to record and then begin recording once your desired song begins. It's a pain, and you can't do it at the beginning of a record. If anyone has a better idea, let me know.

Johnny The Horse -- Madness
Strange Attractors -- Poster Children
Bewitched -- Luna
Sweetness Follows -- REM
Down Colourful Hill -- Red House Painters
Tracy (Kid Loco mix) -- Mogwai
Brand New Order -- Seaweed
C'mon, Let's Spawn -- Make Up
The Fool -- Gorky's Zygotic Mynci

Side B
------
Electric Fence -- Califone
Up With People -- Lambchop
M.O.R. -- Blur
Man Made of CO2 -- Man... Or Astro-Man?
1000 Pounds -- Superchunk
Workin' On Leavin' The Livin' -- Modest Mouse
Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me) -- The Wedding Present
Help The Aged -- Pulp
Nothing Much Happens -- Ben Lee
Simple Things -- Belle And Sebastian

That's it. It's over. I'm taking the children with me.

The last three songs are almost as important as the first three. You want to leave the listener with a haunting feeling, one that will prompt a moment of reflection before they start the tape over again. I usually prefer long songs like Mogwai's "Mogwai Fear Satan" or Spiritualized's "Cop Shoot Cop", but this time I kinda screwed up. I still have what I believe is a decent final song, however, and it leads back in pretty well with the beginning, so I'm happy.

Anyway, I find it's usually best to bring the mood down around the last twenty minutes of the tape, have the second to last song be an intermediary, and then wrap it all up with an emotional grand finale. Save your big fireworks for last. Now's the time to really wow your audience.

So here are my last three songs:

Fade -- Calexico
The Official Ironmen Rally Song -- Guided By Voices
Naomi -- Neutral Milk Hotel

When you're all finished, be sure and take the tape on a test drive. If you find yourself paying more attention to the music than the road, consider it a successful tape, despite what the recipient will say. It's now time to move on to making the case.

I'm usually pretty straightforward when it comes to tape labels. Song names and artists are usually enough for me, but a lot of folks will include collages, bits from the Weekly World News, drawrings, nekkid photos, or whatever. Stick this stuff on the glossy side, and use the rough, papery side to write the song titles on. Your pen will be happier.

My one creative saving grace, aside from the tape itself, is the title. A simple one-liner is a lot cooler than "Bobby Joe's Mix Tape." My favourite has been "Second-Hand Smug". I'm calling this tape "Grok over London" in honour of Wesley Willis.

The best tape case I've seen used a cool picture from some horrible CD, some gears and bolts, and some hot glue. The end product is something that looks very cool and just screams "PLAY ME!" Unfortunately I'm not that artistic, so the bare bones aesthetic will have to do.

There are, of course, many ways to make tapes. Listed above are just the steps I follow. They've never let me down, and I hope they're of some use to some budding record collector out there just dying to justify all the time he spends in front of his stereo system. If you think you're up to the Everything crew's high standards, be sure and check out The Great Grand E2 Mix-Tape Lotto.

the Chihuahua Grub mix-tape hit list:
• icicle (completed 09.11.00, disintegrated sometime in november of 2000, remake pending)
• ideath (pending)
• stand/alone/bitch (completed 05.02.01)
• Lost and Found (pending)
• karmaflux (pending, commissioned through ransom)
• aphexious (pending, remuneration)
• jessicapierce (completed 06.13.01)
• Crux (completed 12.08.01)
• flamingweasel (pending until he sucks giant doodies)
• drunk coconut (completed 05.11.01)
• Phyllis Stein (pending)
• perdedor (pending, heroism and driving above and beyond the call of duty)
• briiiian (pending)
• junkpile (completed 06.12.01)
• Katyana (pending, it's a Wedding Present)
• impishlaugh (pending, ever so pending)
• the gilded frame (pending, remuneration for letting me be a part of weekend sound track)
• dem bones (pending, editorship bribery)
• heyoka (pending, jaffa cakes... mmm...)
• beauvine (pending, make yourself comfortable)
• lawnjart (completed 02.19.03)
• (your name here)

I use one of two methods for creating a Mix Tape: I go with a themed mix, or a variety pack. A variety pack is simply trying to use no more than one song by any one band in the course of the mix. My mix themes include:

• Almost No Lyrics Theme - featuring Phish, Garcia/Grisman, Dave Brubeck, REM, and any other band that's ever released an instrumental track. I use a track with one or two words, like TMBG's song Minimum Wage, somewhere in the middle so that I can call the mix "2 words" or "6 words" or what have you.
• Free Association Theme - Every song has something to do with the one before it and the one after it. A good example would be Red House Painters' Another Song For a Blue Guitar into Led Zeppelin's Bron Yr Aur into Screeching Weasel's I Hate Led Zeppelin, into a song about screeching or weasels... etc.
• Dr. Jekyll & Mr. B-Side - Do this on a tape or on two CDs. Side A or Disc One can be originals, and Side B or Disc Two can be cover songs; a good B-Side would be ska covers, or bluegrass covers (well, I guess it depends on your definition of "good"...). Alteratively, you can pair off songs like Dar Williams' and Leonard Cohen's "Alleluia", or Tori Amos' "Winter" and the Crash Test Dummies' "Winter Song". Two songs with the same title... but they're definitely not the same!
• Title Theme - my favorite one of these was inspired by They Might Be Giants, who produced an album called State Songs whose song titles were all names of American states. Without using their ready-made songs, I tried to make a mix whose track list was composed of state names. By stretching the boundaries, you could include "Meet Virginia" by Train, and "Californication" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Anyhow, I like to think these themes make my mixes a little more interesting. As always, good segues are the key--if you've got a nice movie quote or other sample, use it! If a song doesn't fit your theme, but it's perfect after one of the other songs on your mix, include it; if it makes you feel better, you can leave it off the liner notes.

I've made exactly one mix tape I truly enjoy. I knew why the instant I made it, but only recently figured out that that's also why all my other mix tapes have been utterly forgettable.

This unimaginatively-named mix was assembled one evening when I was in a miserable mood, needed to scream or pound on something. Of course, it's always much less damaging to put on some loud music that'll do the screaming and punching for you, so that's what I headed to the stereo to do: a bit of musical therapy, putting on single after single until all the mad was gone.

But I was getting sick and tired of having to rummage through my CD collection every time I felt like this, so I began to put my bad mood to constructive use and mixed a tape with 'em all for posterity. One manic, thrust-your-fists-at-the-sky-and-damn-the-world song after another, with just enough calmer music in between to catch my breath before launching into another salvo.

Of course, it's hard to stay mad at nothing in particular for ninety minutes straight. By the end of the second side, I was mellowing out and feeling just a bit more upbeat. When I was done, I had a complete recording of my emotional state, highs and lows, all through the roller coaster of angry and including the slowdown at the end. This wouldn't have worked with MP3s and a CD burner, mind you; I had to listen to the songs as I compiled them, or they never would have ended up in the right order. The tape probably wouldn't mean anything to anyone else, but for me it was Perfect.

I still pull this tape out whenever I'm in a sour mood, angry and everything and nothing in particular. I can't start it in the middle, though. I have to rewind it to the start of Side A and play out my emotional recording from beginning to end, or at least most of the way to it. It's the only way it has any theraputic value for me.

Science fiction always comes up with different ideas about how to record human memories and emotions to a disk or a computer. But I've learned that it's possible to do it today, with music, given enough time and a suitably vast CD collection.

When compiling mix tapes in the past, I've frequently thought of the mood and pace of the tape in filmic terms (although this works better for disks because with tapes you have to flip sides in the middle of act 2); always searching for the soundtrack to the film I'll never make.

Instead of trying to be uncompromisingly original, the auteur of one's own mix tape, how about a mix tape that's synchronised to somebody else's movie? An alternative soundtrack?

The Challenges

Two timing complications are synchronisation and overall length. Depending on how accurately you want your mix to tie in with the movie, you need some event at which point the mix should begin. Simply "Press PLAY on the VCR and tape deck simultaneously" only works for one distributed form of the movie, and lead-ins on VHS tapes vary from print to print. A good cue is probably the Studio's banner; every film starts with one. Pink Floyd used the MGM Lion as their synchronisation event.

The overall length is another source of problems. If your movie lasts less than an hour and a half, you have enough space on a C90. But if you're using CD or MD as your medium to avoid side-flipping, you're limited to 72 minutes. The result is either unaccompanied footage at end of the movie, or you have to put the audio on repeat. The challenge this presents is that the music must be timely and appropriate for more than one scene. This is far easier if the length of your mix is calculated so that key scenes of a similar nature are covered by one track. (The best overall length for your mix is thus given by the term having the highest coefficient in the Fourier series describing the intensity of mood throughout the movie; but I digress... almost constantly, as it happens...)

Choosing Your Movie

Audience

The wider the audience that know the movie, the better; if you want to give copies to your friends, it's not going to help if the movie is so obscure (or, conversely, so popular) that your friends aren't going to know of it, or own a copy.

Quality and Endurability

It also has to be something that can be watched again every so often. Pink Floyd's choice of The Wizard of Oz was a good one because everyone's seen it, almost everyone likes it, and it can easily played be once in a while without getting sick of it.
Forgettable summer popcorn muncher hits are unlikely to fit this bill.

Existing Soundtrack

If the existing soundtrack is in a similar vein or is arguably superior to the one you intend making, that would diminish any sense of achievement you might get, or sense of awe you'd inspire in others. Trying to engineer a new soundtrack for Pulp Fiction, for instance, is an exercise in futility since the original one is so well fitted to the movie.

Pace

Yet again The Wizard of Oz seems a good choice; it's scenes are fairly long so it's easy to match a song to each scene. Short scenes need shorter songs, more bleedovers, more segues to keep time.

Pink Floyd at least had the luxury of producing their own songs, and could easily make small adjustments to track length; not so for the rest of us.

The pace of the movie also makes requirements on the precision of your timing. The Wizard of Oz, with its long, lazy fades between scenes, allows significant slack time between track changes. Rapid and dramatic scene changes are less tolerant.

If I ever actually get around to doing this, I'll be sure to post track lists :-)

And remember...

It stands on it's own, and that's what we should aim for too.

The following comes from common sense and a lot of the combined knowledge on the Amtrak-djs mailing list and material archived at http://www.amtrak-djs.org

If you are a budding DJ, you will need to be heard. In order to be heard, you must have one or several mix tapes to give to people who are in a position to give you a job. This tape is an audition, a resume, and a job interview all in one, so make sure you do a good job.

The things you have to watch out for:

Record selection - read deadboat's A guide to buying dance/EDM records. You will need to drop serious cash into vinyl in this job. Audiences are picky about listening to new releases, especially in the more popular areas of trance (sometimes erroneously named progressive house or tech-house, which are different), jungle/drum and bass, and big beat. Detroit techno fans are in general picky about hearing classics, so pay your respects to the Holy Trinity. It's fairly important not to stick to one particular record label or producer, in order to show your versatility. On a mix tape, after all, you only have an hour, while in a club you might have two, three, or more.

Mixing skill - Obviously, this is important. You might think that it's a good idea to record all your tracks into Pro Tools or Sound Forge, then mix them together Global Underground-style. It's not. If you can't handle live mixing, and you get booked, and then you do a terrible job, you will be worse off than someone who's ready to pay his dues.

Experience - Don't pass any up. Ever. If someone wants you to spin at a noder gathering, do it. If you have the opportunity to get a show on a radio station, college or otherwise, do it. that's how Jeff Mills got started. It will provide more opportunities for you to give out your tape!

Pacing - Treat your tape like a proxy between you and your audience. Are you trying to take them on a journey through space and time via dance music? Perhaps educate them in the long history of techno? Perhaps you want to show your mad skillz on tha deckz? Or maybe you just want to make them get funky? No matter what, you have to build this mix up from the ground. Relying on the increasing crowd density won't work, cause there's nobody else but your only listener. You have to rely on increasing tension throughout, and the manner of doing that will be different for every mixer. The best resource in this case is to know the tracks you're playing, and to listen carefully to DJ's who know how to work a crowd. (e.g. LTJ Bukem, Sasha, Stacey Pullen for starters)

Recording - You may want to pick out the tracks you play beforehand. You may not. Either way, make sure your recording is normalized before you start duplicating it. Listen to it all the way through, checking for clips and sections that are too quiet.

Giving the dang thing out - Go out. Become a familiar face. Make lots of copies and give them to everyone. (Make sure you have contact info on the label, too!) If you see a DJ you love, try and talk to her after her set. Be polite. Hand her a tape. Recloose gave a demo to Carl Craig while the former was working at a sub shop and the latter came in. The order arrived with the CD stuck in the sandwich.

No, I can't guarantee any of this will work. There are incredible electronic musicians slaving their lives away with no big-time bookings, and there are guys with no talent making it big. Life is a pain like that.