making a mix tape

That's right I'm making a mix tape. The sad casualty of digital technology making mix tapes used to be a real art form like knitting or recording an album finding those songs that are just right, inserting arty and interesting filler when you end up with thirty seconds of dead air at the end of a side creating a cool looking tape cover and listening to the whole thing afterwards and writing up the song list. I think it's been almost ten years since the last mix tape I made.

This one is for my mom on the occasion of her 60th birthday. I took a lot of raw audio of songs I'd either written or learned and I had been thinking of putting them all together in one place for some time this just seemed the most appealing way. So I've been working on it for hours and it's just about finished. I really like how it's come out and I learned something really awsome about my double tape deck. It doesn't exactly record over something... It records overtop of things, so I can layer tracks overtop of one another but after two tracks it starts to get muddy but this means that I can basically make primitive audio collage, and I did.

I'm sad that the mix tape has been phased out in favour of the ipod and mp3 technology. We think that this technology has made things easier, and maybe it has but it's also taken a lot of our freedom away. I'm talking about the freedom to record and shape sounds in analog. If you want to do what I did today with track layering you need to buy a lot of fancy audio software and get really technical and granted if you've got the time and the skill it could come out better than what I did but all I had to do was put on two tapes and record them playing together and with a little patience and good timing I've made some awsome sound collage.