The Death of the Mix

Old school 90-minute
Maxell tape

This concept opened up the door for a lot of songs that were good but were too long to fit into mixes, or sometimes just too long to bear up to repeated listening. Led Zeppelin’s “Moby Dick,” for example, has a great groove but the drum solo in the middle is about half of the song, and you don’t want to hear the whole thing every time. I recut the song so that there is still some solo, but not so much that it owns the song. That brought the length down from 4:20 to 2:40.

This method is also good for songs with overly-repetitive passages. Gary Numan’s “Sister Surprise” is 8:30 and has quite a few sections between verses where the same progression is played over and over. Under normal circumstances, these parts give the song a more cinematic feel, but on a mix I’m primarily interested in the verses and choruses. Tightening up the extended instrumentals and reordering the verses brought the song in at 3:42. It’s a great method if used judiciously, since it can free up song space that was taken up by redundant or superfluous passages.

“Cassettiquette” Mix CD Cover Art
© DJ Wrongtom

As a result of all of these improvements that the computer-based mix provides, the mix-maker now not only has an incredible amount of choices he can make, but an incredible amount of choices he has to make. When I decide to make a mix, the number of possibilities is rather daunting. Even when the track order is decided on, and the transitions between tracks are set, there are always things that can be done to improve the final product. And the relative ease of these improvements ends up turning into obligation. Since I have the power to change the volume of the songs, there’s no excuse not to make the volume perfect. Tweaking all of these variables can take a while: the last CD mix I made took me two months to finish, and that’s after I had already decided on the song list. It’s no surprise that just the idea of doing another one makes me tired.

Of course, I can always bow to modern technology and make my mixes on the iPod. That’s much more like the old tape mixes, since they’re just playlists of songs in a certain order—no fades, no special effects. I do have some playlists on my iPod, but I never listen to them. I have become addicted to the shuffle play, so I don’t really ever listen to a single song twice, much less a group of twenty. Add to that the fact that I have 5,000 songs that I haven’t listened to yet, and the playlist starts to seem less appealing.

Chinavision’s Cassette Tape MP3 Player

Like the PC-based music software, the technology of the iPod has made mix-making much less urgent for me. It may be that once I’ve listened to everything once, I’ll become interested in creating conceptual music structures again, but who knows? Everything’s always changing, and that makes life interesting.

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