Thanks to the Hills, Wareckis, and Kokkos in my life, music mix tapes are called something a bit different: samplers.
I’ve been making samplers since I was sixteen. I started mixing down from a high end Kenwood turntable (yep, vinyl) with the exquisite Shure V15 mk IV cartridge. I later graduated to mixing onto Clark’s reel to reel, 1/4″ tape machine. 15 inches per second, Dolby C. Tail out, of course.
See, I hung out with audio geeks.
I lost use of the professional equipment when I moved to Yellowknife. The first sampler I created up there was entitled “Life in the ‘knife”. I forget what I put on it, but it would have been a selection of late eighties Europop. I was reminded of that sampler by Greg, with whom I recently got back in touch. He tells me that he occasionally puts it on, and remembers me by it (it’s been 22 years).
I’d call that pretty good longevity.
The point is, even though I don’t know what’s on the ‘knife sampler (‘knife was the local shorthand for the City of Yellowknife) I do know what’s not on it. That’s because for every sampler, there’s rules. And therein lies the raison d’etre for this post.
I’m in sampler mode.
Rules for Samplers
- One artist per sampler – self explanatory. Samplers are not about the three best songs from XYZ, with another four from QED. This first rule – possibly the hardest for some to stick to – forces you to choose the best song from the CD or album. That process is very much worth going through.
- No hits – kind of anti-intuitive. It’s not AM pap radio, or worse, music of your life.. It’s about the music, and so the latest hit single usually doesn’t make it on. Hardly ever. (It would have to be damned good.)
- Theme – a good sampler has a cohesive theme that ties the songs together. This is harder to do than it might seem, but some past themes have included dance, chill out, regional (Canadian) mix, and new music not on the top 40. Themes… get it?
- Flow – the beats and rhythms and textures gotta flow with each other. That doesn’t mean that that it’s a CD full of the same rhythms, just that the ebb and flow needs to… ebb and flow.
There are probably others as well, which I shall add when they come to me.
Rob, the brilliant protagonist of Nick Hornby’s Hi Fidelity, has rules as well (even if the wanker calls it a compilation tape).
A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to hold the attention. Then you have to take it up a notch, but not blow your wad, so maybe cool it off a notch, and you can’t put the same artist twice on the tape, except if some subtle point or lesson or theme involved, and even then not the two of them in a row, and you can’t woo somebody with Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and then bash their head off with something like GBH’s “City Baby Attacked by Rats,” and… oh, there are a lot of rules.
All of this to say that’s working on a few mix-tape ideas. There’s the Cover Song Sampler (original songs along with cover versions I particularly like), a new Canada Day Sampler (one song for each province and territory, and a Commercial Sampler – good songs made bad by use in television commercials.