My first mixtapes were recorded straight off FM radio, with a nice clean stereo signal, so these were very listenable, even if i had to put up with some songs overlapping, some with Mr. DJ's voice over the intro or outro, and some abruptly chopped off.... oops, the tape ended before the song did. Still, those were my first taste of the world of home recording.
My radio mixtapes were usually the setlists that DJs or the stations programmed, but there were tapes that I'd compiled song by song, poised over the record button as I listened to an evening of music on my parents' stereo receiver. Headphones clamped on tight, blocking out my loud "jungle music" from the folks' delicate ears. Sometimes DJs would play a set of songs by a single artist... often called a "super-set", or an album side, or an entire album.... even a full day or (gasp!) a full weekend of music by one artist ..... I actually sat and recorded whole weekends of Rush and Led Zeppelin, who of course had huge catalogues that would demand days, not just hours, to play in their entirety.
Homemade mixtapes became common in the 80's, thanks
to affordable quality equipment. The 1995 novel (and 2000
movie) High Fidelity celebrated mixtape culture.
Once I'd built a reasonably sized tape collection, both radio dubs and store-bought, I began cobbling together my first TRUE mixtapes. ones that reflected my mood or intention,.... for myself, a friend, a family member, a fellow tape-trader, a girlfriend, a prospective friend or girlfriend. a music fan, a non-music fan....to introduce someone else to a new artist or type of music.
I used to borrow tapes from the public library back in the early to mid-80's, when I was a money-strapped college student. I'd play the tapes on my Walkman-style personal device, running a line into my home audio cassette deck, where I'd record a new copy of the tape. On occasion a friend and I would swap tapes, which I'd dub as well. That was a super cheap way to build up the music collection. And along the way, other friends recorded their vinyl LPs onto tape for me. Ah, those glory days... when thoughts of media piracy were non-existent. Oh, and if I still wanted to grab songs off the radio during my college days, I'd run a line out of my stereo clock radio into my cassette deck. Worked like a charm.
Back in the 80's and even into the 90's, I used many configurations of equipment to create mixtapes: double tape decks for dubbing.... Walkman to component deck.... Walkman to boombox (we called it a guetto-blaster back then, but I believe that term is considered politically incorrect nowadays - right?), and boombox to system deck, So many variations that worked just fine back then. The sound only suffered over multiple generations of a recording. And the sound quality was also a matter of personal taste or perception... I was a lot less finicky about perfection then, whereas now, I hate the sound of many MP3 sound files. There's such a loss of bottom end and things often sound thin and tinny and cold.
But to backtrack slightly again: then along came CDs.... and even higher quality cassette tapes. With new and improved tape formulations like chromium dioxide and metal bias, plus Dolby noise reduction on the deck. tapes sounded just about as good as a CD, especially on a car stereo where automobile rumbling and rattling drowned out any little audio tape imperfections. or even at home on a quality playback deck.
Again, I recorded mixtapes for myself, mainly for the car, but sometimes for my portable player. and for others, of course. And once I got set up with a computer with a CD burner, I was away to the races. A whole new world opened up: internet access to any song I wanted, and an easy method of capturing the best possible sound... ripping from one CD to another.
Metal tape....
The cumbersome tape medium and recording process was streamlined by the sophisticated computer software. It was so much easier to slap down the perfect home-made disc of a musical set of my own concoction.
I had such great fun developing mixtapes and later mixCDs (actually called mixtapes, presumably to extend the moniker to the new medium). I don't do this so much anymore, but occasionally I'll introduce a friend to some electronic music with a mixCD. With this hobby, you spend more time with each song... listening and re-listening... is this going to flow nicely... from the previous song... and then into the next song? Maybe think about common themes in lyrics or song titles or music styles. Nice clean sequencing with a proper start and finish to each song, where you can dictate if there's a noticeable gap between songs or maybe the songs actually "touch", with just a fraction of a second between them.
I remember making a tape of slow and sultry music for my girlfriend in the 80's. There were songs from Roxy Music's Avalon album on there, some Alan Parsons, Cheap Trick's shmaltzy ballads of that era, and stuff along those lines - light, melodic and gently rhythmic.
I had a few excellent heavy metal mixtapes, too. For some reason, it took a lot more work to assemble the perfect metal mix. I guess I came close with my early 90's tape containing Killer Dwarves, Voivod, Lee Aaron, Megadeth, Testament, and Suicidal Tendencies. That got a lot of playing time in my car back then.
When my daughter was old enough, I bought her her very own boombox and gave to her with that a few mixtapes of my own invention. She already knew what she liked in music, since I shared with her my own tastes from my large CD collection. So I made up compilations of her favourites: Beatles, Monkees, Diana Krall, 80's music, and classics (and some lesser known gems) of the pop and rock genres. To this day, she thanks me for exposing her to such a wide range of great music from an early age. Things like Lindsey Buckingham, Beach Boys, Shuffle Demons, Bangles, and Police.
The first mixtapes were bootleg 8-track
tapes sold at truck stops and flea markets
in the late 60's and 70's (note that the Elvis
8-track pictured is not a mixtape)
During the mid-to-late 90's I found some like-minded tape-traders on the internet and we swapped compilations by snail mail. This is how I discovered some weird and wonderful progressive rock and electronic music. I remember checking out Porcupine Tree and Spock's Beard on a trader friend's tape. And in return, I offered some Ozric Tentacles and Grid.
I made a handful of really good electronic music mixes, both on tape and CD: a super chillin' tape (and later on CD) featuring the likes of Chicane, Air, Brian Eno, David Sylvian, and FSOL; a few supercharged dance party ones with the likes of BT, Orbital and Empirion; and a more esoteric collection of weirdness with Eat Static, 808 State, and Fluke's appliances-making-music.
I suppose my best work was a full tape of instrumental James Bond movie music, culled from my many different CDs of Bond scores, and assembled as a soundtrack to a day in the life of a spy. Quiet, tense music for code-breaking; frantic, exciting car chase music; then some shrill and thrilling dynamics for a shoot-out in the secret underground lair. I'm really pleased with the sequencing on that one... the successful blending of old and new Bond music.... very dramatic and intense and ..... very, very cool. I've been dying to re-do that set on CD - someday.
The mixtape hobby is still a thing these days. Whether it's in a physical form like a tape or CD... even a USB stick, or in completely digital form as a playlist on YouTube or iTunes, the mixtape as a share-able bit of one's musical personality lives on.
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