The Mixed Tape

It is easy now to make a compilation of music to your own taste, making a playlist of digital tracks. This can be just a random jumble of songs you like, played back in a random order, or a set of music with a certain mood or theme. At its best it is a kind of art-form, a way to create a set of music that is greater than the sum of its parts, like the albums that you never want to play on shuffle or delete songs from.

In the early days, this was done with cassette tapes. There was a somewhat laborious process of recording songs from the radio, or vinyl, or other tapes in the right order on a blank cassette tape. I did not do much of this mixed tape construction, although I did enjoy the compilations I got from friends. I started getting in to it when digital music technology made it easy. 

Some of the fun in the old format was working with the limits of the tape size. I have two formats now that I build playlists in. With my iTunes library, I build playlists that fill a CD, so I can burn them for friends or for our car, which is just old enough to have a CD player but not a USB input. On Google Music, which I am still really enjoying, I use a different format - the "dozen track" format. I have a couple of recent ones I can link to, for those of you reading who are using that streaming service.

Brian's Google Dozen #3 [Psychedelic]

Brian's Google Dozen #4 [Classical Geek]

Brian's Christmas 2015 CD [CD format] 

These are fun to put together, I hope you enjoy them, too!