Friday, February 02, 2007

Lamenting the Mix Tape


I have been the recepient and the creator of mix tapes in the past, and I admit they do work as part of the ritual of wooing. They also work as part of proving you have a way cool record collection. With this in mind, a friend sent this Guardian article to me this week:
As any old-school mix-meister will tell you, compiling a tape takes a rare combination of skills, including instinct, knowledge, patience and, of course,
consummate good taste.

Ahem, Mr. O'Hagen, I would love a copy of that tape.

2 comments:

Todd Totale said...

A friend, who's a music geek like me, recently had a conversation lamenting the lost art of the mix tape. We were not only missing the act of the mix tape, but the actions of it too.
It sounds stupid, but even the little things like putting together the cover art, timing out the songs to fit on that 45 minutes per side, fading out a track early if your math was off, and boosting the levels on those sources that we a little low.
Good times, and now there's a generation that will never know the joy (and drama, if you were making one to get in the good graces of someone you wanted) of making a killer mixtape.

Carol Harrison said...

Yep. Swapping playlists isn't the same. Indeed, it began to change with CDs when you could skip tracks more easily and sides were eliminated. The care it took to flip the record over was gone as was the ability to manipulate the song by changing the speed and pitch of the turntable. Now that songs are files, it's the extention that determines if you're a match (.wav or .mp3? Sorry, it's not compatible with my device.)