Mixtape Philosophies....

I'm finally beginning to live up to the many empty promises of mixtapes I've made over the past weeks/months/years (you know who you are!) ...

I've just completed my second mixtape in 3 weeks so I guess that's a good thing. This one is pretty much a psychedelic mix (what I do best, I think) for a local music-nerd friend... and it's pretty good ifidosaysomeself.

I try to crossfade tracks when possible to give it a produced feel and I always NORMALIZE the audio at the very least. This makes the volume track to track virtually the same, so you're not always reaching to turn the volume up or down with each new track.

Because of my ancient PC equipment (Yes I have yet to touch even a P3), I use old (and hacked) programs including CoolEdit Pro 2.0 (this is to delete leading or trailing silence, fade in/out, edit...) and Audiograbber (this has the best normalization routine I've met so far-- Nero's normalization option is not very good at all and actually may screw up the equalization of the tracks. Beware!

My mix philosophy is generally to have no or almost no silence between tracks unless the preceding track was so weird you actually need a second to catch your breath. This makes it "flow". If I can crossfade stuff, I do. It makes it sound "live". Or at least in my dreams it does. Sometimes, when I'm feeling particularly cheeky (lame) I add samples of speeches, TV themes, noise, etc. President Bush (I/"Senior"/"41")'s speeches are a favorite. Particularly "1000 Points of Light" or the Iraq Invasion speeches. They all sound so ominous! Current Bush's speeches never sound ominous, just... inept. Plus Michael Moore has sampled his stuff so often it's gone stale. I should start sampling Gerald Ford. That would be FRESH.

As to title of the mix, it should come from one of the songs or a song lyric. I don't just pull it out of thin air. :) The image is even lazier-- just put in the title of the mix into google image search and see what comes up. Worked perfectly for my latest (see next post)....

so to those people who I have promised mixes.... watch out! here it comes!