the order of tones and semitones
"To me, making a tape is like writing a letter—there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with "Got to Get You Off My Mind," but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs and...oh, there are loads of rules."my new theory is that there are two types of people in the world: firstly, those that obsess and sweat over a mix CD, changing the tracks and their order to perfect transition, mood, and the general experience (journey?) of the mix. Multiple versions are made, listened to at home and in the car, changed, re-made, ad nauseum. Then I believe there is the other type of person who coolly loads a bunch of songs into windows media player and hits the burn button, spending the rest of their time designing the cover art. I have utmost respect for the latter because (as you may have guessed) I am of the former camp (though I also tend to spend a good amount of time on the cover art).
- Rob, High Fidelity
actually, it's only gotten worse since society transitioned from mix tapes to CDs. Before, it was prohibitively difficult to modify a mix once it was made; now, it's just a matter of swapping songs in and out of a playlist. But, with infinite possibilites comes endless second-guessing and re-compiling. This has been compounded by my having access to sound editing software where I can seamlessly fade-and-stitch each track into the next or edit beginnings and endings to cut or modify elements of a song that just don't fit the mix. I once went as far as cutting apart and rebuilding the opening eight bars of a song that originally had talking that I wanted to eliminate*.
is it obsession? a lack of other creative outlets? a deep passion for music that won't allow half-assed work?
what are your rules for a mix?
*the song was the cowboy junkies' version of "sweet jane" that was on the natural born killers soundtrack. a fantastic cover, one of my favorites, but the intro featured all these clips from the movie that take away from the song. I spent a sick amount of time reconstructing the song and also take a sick amount of pride in the result.
random bits cobbled together by j-dub
2 Comments:
i am quite committed as mix tapes go. i miss the days of writing out the songlist on paper and then doing the cassette tape construction. but now things are just as interesting. i have a thing about the mastering and wanting to make sure none of the songs sounds too suddenly quiet. also, if the transition should be dramatic, then i've gotta chop up the beginning and end of the songs to put the exact right, unquantifiable amount of space between them. and i spend time on the cover, too, because i think that's where the gesture really comes together, and it's a matter of feeling, coz the tracklist has to be presented the right way--typing it is good sometimes, but handwriting others. generally, something generated by a computer doesn't make me happy. earthy is better. handwrite it, for example, and alternate the name of the band and song, and hope the recipient will have to think a little to know which is which. no tracklist conveys a certain mood, too. just a naked cd evokes the unknown. those ones have to be short. there is so much vocabulary here, and the beauty of it is that generally you give the mixtape to someone who doesn't obsess about the vocabulary--you want them to feel it, not decode it. you want to make them happy, and also have them wonder how you did it. it should be effortless, and you attain that by sheer force of effort on the front end. ah.
effortless: that's it. smoothing out the rough spots.
actually, I think you wrote it up much better than I did.
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