The Mix Tape Project

Project origins

Maybe 2 years ago I got it in my head to start making mix tapes spurred by a gift idea for a loved one particularly dear to me who had a birthday on the horizon. My relationship to the physical cassette tape and the audio they store is a long one that runs a line along the evolution of my love of music in its many forms.

I must have been 9 or 10 when I got my first album. Some kind college student working at my family’s restaurant made me a cassette tape copy of Moby’s 1999 album, Play. (As a brief aside I recently aged myself considerably when talking to a younger colleague who had never heard of Moby, much less Play. I was aghast. They were clueless. Tragic on all fronts.) I had an alarm clock/radio/tape player that I eventually planted in my bed so I could listen to the album over and over again while I was supposed to be sleeping. I still remember the semi-translucent plastic tape with a simple white sticker along its length, “MOBY - PLAY” written in neat, thin blue pen. It was a stroke of luck to be given such a stunning, genre spanning album as my first.

While tapes were never far away, present in my parent’s home and those of many other family members, it would be a number of years before I ended up buying one myself. My generation was squarely in the thick of CDs’ dominant reign and with the ubiquity of CD players I was happy to slowly add discs to my collection. Eventually one hot summer I was splitting time between Iowa and Milwaukee, and I had somehow availed myself to the family station wagon. Being the old car it was, it had only a tape deck. Making matters trickier still, its deck resisted cooperating with any of the old tape-to-AUX adapters that were once ubiquitous, rendering useless whatever iPod was at hand. So one of my cousins and I, glued at the hip that summer, set out to find ourselves some tapes. What was the point of having use of a car if you had no tunes for your drives?

So rummaging in an old music shop on Brady street in Milwaukee (can’t remember the name) we found ourselves some tapes that looked suitable. The only one I remember, really, was Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus. Neither of us had consciously listened to any Mingus before, but we liked the way the type setting clattered and clambered over itself on the album cover (it also helped that, this being before any retro-nostalgia drove up old format prices, the tape couldn’t have cost more than a few bucks). If you haven’t listened to that album, do yourself the favor.

It opens with “II B.S.” (“Haitian Fight Song”). The song starts innocuously: Mingus puts down a motif on his bass. Spare percussion circles around with palpable threat, only to accelerate into the track alongside urgent horns that almost shout for the lead. One crescendo and swell after another. Words don’t do it justice. Hearing it the first time was rapturous. My cousin and I, driving around an otherwise aimless summer night, turning the volume up and up, smacking each other and laughing gobsmacked like prospectors who just hit a vein. The album continued to take us places that evening, and it still has that power relistening today, as great albums do.

Great albums and great mixes are alike in that way: in taking you places, they beg to be listened to, end to end. The arrangement matters, of the tracks within themselves of course, and in relation to each other across the length of the album. Tapes more than any other format appeal in this matter: they’re a distinct pain in the ass to skip around (even more so than vinyl). Much easier to pop in the tape, hit play, and let yourself enjoy the ride.

They are as finite as they are linear, quite unlike the endless, amorphous “playlists” of today’s streaming era. If you tell me “I have this great playlist!” and upon inspection “Workout tunes” is just 5 hours of 130bpm club bangers, pop songs, and other orderless high energy tracks like..well…I don’t know that you have a playlist. More like a play pool. Also, these can be fun! I have them too. But an ordered linear list it is not. I digress…

All physical formats have some limitation on playback. CDs hold 80 minutes of continuous playback (technically 79 minutes and 59 seconds). The modern vinyl LP played at 33⅓ RPM runs about 20-25 mins a side. Cassettes offer a few different playback lengths, but 30 and 45 minutes a side were the most common made. And if you’re wondering why so many albums run between 40-60 minutes, here’s your historical pattern (an essay for another time).

I’m a firm believer that constraints are the mother of creativity and innovation, and can scarcely think of a medium or domain where this isn’t true, from making art to startups. Constraints can help you get started and know when you’re done, force you to cut or focus where you’d otherwise meander endlessly (a good exercise in its own right), and provide shape and structure through boundaries leaving space to be filled by your own work (see the Tao Te Ching for more aphorisms about “usefulness from what is not there”).

This project is ultimately an exercise in filling that space with joy and intent, then giving it away. The process of making mix tapes was never trivial, and the streaming era presents new idiosyncrasies to work through. If you want to learn more out of curiosity, or because you are interested in making some tapes of your own, I’ll be updating the “Constraints and Methods” part of this project along with the “Results” as I go. As always, if anything here has spurred questions or ideas and you want to jam, drop me a line. Happy listening ✌️

Constraints and Methods

Why are you doing this?

Constructing a playlist can come with a number of existential questions: Is the mix about making the listener feel something? Communicating through song selection and arrangement? Or perhaps intended as an accompaniment to a specific activity? Should the two sides present some sort of symmetry or explicit relation? I’m not going to spend any time helping you answer these questions. Instead I’m going to presume that you’re starting with a “good playlist.”

What that might look like:

You decided on your playlist’s purpose, even if it’s just “accompany a walk in the park.” (don’t worry, playlists aren’t sentient-AI-butter-dish-passers, a simple purpose works great)
The selected tracks “make sense” together, along with track to track transitions, and the overall play length.
“Makes sense” means in whatever way appeals to your ears for the playlist’s purpose. If it sounds right to you then don’t overthink it.
You’re pleased with the end result! Yes it’s cheesy but no reason to spend the time otherwise.

Constraints of format

Tapes are an ideal format to house a good, well thought out playlist by virtue of the constraints (and advantages) they offer:

Run time of 60-90 mins in total split evenly across two sides.
2 distinct sides gives you a degree of freedom in making two distinct imprints, related or not.
Tapes’ analog nature means they’re “less fussy” about what you record to them. If you can send it to a tape recorder’s line in, it’ll stick.

This does a few things for us which may or may not be self-apparent: there’s a reasonable range of time you need to fill, your recipient can’t easily skip track 3 which you decided is the best way to get from track 2 to 4 (if the playlist is a gift), you can add essentially any audio you like (maybe you want to start side B with a voice note or your cat purrs at the right tone to connect track 6 and 7).

Overview of equipment and process

At its simplest, here’s what you’ll need to get started:

A good playlist/source audio
Reasonably good tape recorder
An audio line to go from source → recorder
Blank tape that matches (or a not-blank, sacrificial tape and some tape)

And your method for recording a tape is at first blush equally simple:

Connect your source → recorder
Put in your blank tape
Hit record on the deck
Hit play on the source
Wait

This is hand waving away a decent amount of complexity and nuance. So let’s dig in.

Some notes on equipment

Source audio

You used to make a mix tape in one of two ways. You had a tape deck with one line in, and you pause recording between tracks to swap the source (tape to tape, vinyl to tape, mic, etc). Or, you had a mixer

Tape recorders

You should get your hands on whatever reasonable

Perhaps more so than other formats (certainly more than CDs), tapes are susceptible to “clipping.” This happens when your audio source is too “big” for its destination (literally the amplitude of the soundwave exceeds the limits of the tape). Imagine overfilling a cake pan with batter. When you go to bake it, the majority of the batter will stay in the pan, but a bunch overflows, spilling everywhere and making your cake a misshapen, burnt-in-places-undercooked-in-others mess.

TBC