Mixtapes: A Philosophy
Though I would never in my right mind purchase a pre-recorded tape, I see blank audiocassette tapes as a relic of a past age, a relic with redeeming qualities that CDs have yet to successfully compete with.
First off, you can get tapes in 90 or 110-minute lengths. Back in the day, this meant you could fit an entire LP on a side, and another LP on the other side, then put it in your pocket or in your car. Though the portability of tapes is no longer a deciding factor in someone purchasing one, the length is still a positive. 74-minute blank CDs used to be the norm, until 80-minute versions came out. That’s still ten minutes shy of the shorter tapes you can buy. The longer tape is a full half-hour longer than the longer CD you can buy. When it comes to making a mix for someone, why limit yourself to 80 minutes?
The ease in which one can turn a list of songs into a CD has lessened the emotional impact of giving someone a mix. Making a quality mix, no matter the recording medium, takes time. I will shortly get into why. But once you’ve compiled what you believe to be the perfect mix for the situation, you pop a CD in your drive, and tell it to burn. In a matter of minutes you have a digital, soulless hard copy of your mix. That’s where the tape comes in. At the point in which one would put a CD in their drive, the tape-lover would begin the phase of mix making that truly separates the tape from the CD. The act of recording music onto a tape is far more personal than its CD counterpart. Making a tape requires the creator to actively copy each song onto the tape. This serves, in part, to allow the creator to make changes to the music that a CD creator would be unable to make without expensive equipment or software. I’m talking about fading, splicing, omissions… all kinds of good stuff. The fact that one can personalize a tape puts it above CDs in that respect. What’s more, it forces the creator to connect with the mix on a far more personal level. The person making the tape is experiencing the mix as he is making it; he is the first person to hear the mix.
One thing that LPs and tapes have in common, besides being analog, is the fact that they both promote the unity of the mix. An album today does not hold true to the same qualities of an album of decades past. An album is a unit, a block of music, it is an entity, a collection of songs that work together in some way. A great mix will have the qualities of an album. It will flow, it will have a consistency of mood; and if it does not have consistency, it will have an evolution of mood. Listening to an album takes one on a journey; it puts a listener in a place for its duration. A CD, though still referred to as an ‘album’ by most record companies, is not in fact an album. A tape or LP listener is discouraged from – though capable of – skipping a song, or repeating a song by itself. CDs make it far too easy for a user to program tracks, or repeat tracks they like and skip tracks they don’t know. This prevents most people from truly discovering and loving an album in its entirety. And since a quality mix is made not as a bunch of songs put on the same CD, but as specifically-selected components of a larger whole, a mix is essentially an album. When a band makes a truly stellar album, don’t you think they’d prefer if every song is listened to and appreciated not only as a song, but as a piece of the album of which it is a part? The same should be true for a mix.
Unlike CDs, which abruptly stop working, tapes deteriorate gradually through heavy usage. Multiple listenings will render a tape subtly – though noticeably – worn in comparison to a fresh, unused tape. A tape will not suddenly become unreadable, like so many CDs. Over the course of hundreds of listenings bits of musical data will mingle with their neighbors, and a tape will soften around the edges of its musical range. A person’s favorite shirt is identifiable to his friends because it is heavy weathered, it has been used and loved and it shows. A tape is no different. A worn tape tells those who are exposed to it that its owner loves it, that the tape has a special place in someone’s life and cannot be easily replaced. It’s a character that CDs are incapable of developing, a character unique to analog media.
There may never be another recording medium that has the qualities of tapes that I mentioned above. Until such a medium is discovered and made available to the public, people like me will continue to make our mixes exclusively on tape.
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