Inspiration & Direction
The first (and most important) step to making a mix is to be inspired by something or someone. Often times I’ve created entire mixes around one song that truly motivated me to find other beautiful compositions that complimented the original song. Most often though I find that the cliche takes hold and I wind up letting a person become the inspiration for a mix. Whether it’s a friend down in the dumps, a new love interest, a friend with a different music background than my own, I end up making a mix for a real live human being.
Part of finding inspiration is also finding direction. My mix “clear plastic cups” was a 2-disc set with one disc titled “half empty” and the other being “half full”. As one may have guessed, one disc represented a more subdued and down-tempo rhythmic pattern, while the other “half full” represented positive and happy music. “If I was a robot” was inspired by the electronic music that seemed to be infiltrating my life during the time period I made that mix. “If I was a Robot” wound up being distributed to many friends and was acclaimed as being a good introduction for common people to the likes of apparat, hot chip, vhs or beta, and other similar artists.
Compilation
The moment I decide the inspiration and direction of the mix, it’s time to compile the songs. Since I keep all my music in iTunes, this is where I turn to start adding songs. The first thing I do is create a generic playlist with a code name.
Once I dive into iTunes and I create my generic playlist, I go to my main library and organize by stars (or ratings), and then by recency of addition. When adding songs, I tend to take the shotgun approach in that I add every song that is a possible mix contender. When I review songs with stars first, I find the classic gems that I have loved over the years, you know, the ones that you could listen to over and over again because the songs are so good. Once I have exhausted the highest ranked songs I turn to my recents list. This is a smart playlist that keeps the songs I have added within the last few months. This helps keep my mix fresh with new and current songs of the current time period. Sure, songs off Abbey Road are stellar, but chances are the intended audience has already heard those songs. The thought that is always in the back of my mind when mixing is good and new.
Once we are done adding songs, we may have up to 100 songs in our single playlist. In this case I would recommend creating a second playlist to manage the overflow, or to keep any b-sides. Nothing is better than giving your mix to someone, having it be well crafted, but to also supply a suplimentry disc of all the songs that didn’t make the cut. Our mission is to then get the 30-100 songs (depending on how liberal your adding process went) down to 1 hour and 20 minutes.
…stay tuned for paring down of the tracks, on-the-fly mixing, doing the final mix down, naming the mix, and then designing and packaging the final product.
