I’m not good at making mix CD’s. I’m a member of a ‘Christmas Music Mix CD’ circle. You make a mix CD, and send it to the other 3 people in your group. Theoretically, they do the same.
I just don’t have the music mojo needed to do it well. I have some great songs, and I really want to include them, but I have no clue how to best bridge them together into something that almost, sorta, half way flows together.
Let’s see. In other news, estate sales are fun, interesting, and dangerous.
I was driving Sandra to her upper GI appointment, and I saw an ‘estate sale’ sign. We talked about it some, and if she felt up to it afterwards, we decided to stop by. The owner of the house obviously had to have the best of the best in almost everything. But they had passed away. And now all their stuff was for sale. Most of the art was odd to my taste, but there was a BEAUTIFUL oil painting of a cafe in Venice with 3 animals sitting in the piazza in front of it, with a canal off in the right side background. Now I just need to get the sucker appraised to see if I got ripped off (and to see how much of a rider I need to put on my home owners insurance). I don’t think I got ripped off, and I really enjoy the piece, so I’m not unhappy to have it mounted on the wall.
Okay, making a mix cd isn’t that hard (and it’s gotten easier what with MP3s and being able to put everything together before you actually put it onto it’s final media).
There’s a lot of ways to do it that require a good idea of music and tempo and rhythm and all of that. But there’s also a pretty easy way to cheat.
Divide the music up into three categories based on tempo. Fast, medium and slow. The idea is to mix up the tempos, but never to jump from fast to slow or slow to fast without going through something in the middle first. Two or three fast songs, a middle song or two and then two or three slower songs back to a song or two in the middle and back to the fast songs. That gives you the general outline.
Then, there’s the issue of ordering the actual songs. Easiest way I’ve found to do this is to listen to the last few seconds of a song and the first first few seconds of another song. If they sound like they go together pretty well, you’re good to go. If they don’t, try something else.
If you have a song that starts funny and you can’t figure out what to put before it, use that song to start (and hope you don’t have another one). Same way with a song that ends weird, put that one at the end. Songs that start or end abruptly can be hard. If they’re upbeat songs, you can try pairing them together. Otherwise, just try to make the transition not terribly jarring. This can be accomplished by pairing a song that ends abruptly with one that starts of slowly or quietly. There’s something about a couple of moments of silence that sorta clears out the ears and helps make the transitions smooth.
A couple of other pointers, don’t put two songs that sound really, really similar to each other right after one another. Avoid putting songs by the same artist or group back to back. And try not to have more than a couple of songs by the same artist or group in your mix (or it starts to sound like a “best of” mix. Unless that’s what you’re going for.) And, don’t forget to have fun. Half the time people are just going to dump the songs onto their ipods and listen on shuffle anyway, so don’t sweat it too much.