A
footnote to
the art of the mix.
Fifteen long years of
gluing,
paper clipping,
stapling, and nailing the final product of musicians together for
money and in the interest of boosting the
signal to noise ratio of
the recording industry, facilitating
collaborative efforts without the bothersome and
astronomical expense of dealing with musicians, and sharing the treasure of great music and skill with friends and lovers has taught me many valuable things.
Many of these things are touched upon
above by other practitioners of the art.
I would like to stress this…I listen to much music, and when I listen best is when I am smoking, driving or wearing headphones.
I mix for these conditions.
It is these situations when the music carries you along and each song is a journey. There are countless songs I love, yet many are not worthy of the mix, for they are journeys that dead end and may not be places others wish to go, or perhaps your listeners have been there so often that the trip has lost its magic.
Many times I have
miss-stepped among magic, less now than in my analog days. I now strive to take my listeners to wondrous places each and every turn, to surprise and delight them with the liquid smooth bridges I build between songs. I strive for a tone metamorphosis with lyrical tendrils that span the different selections reinforced by clever samples dropped into cozy hollows.
I cut a river to carry you away and home again.
If you are digital, you know that media
are cheap cheap cheap. Do yourself and your mailing list a favor and burn a compilation of songs you wish to use and LISTEN to it several times… in this you can weed out tunes you will later hate yourself for using and you can envision others that will better fit. Consider long and don’t rush, display craftsmanship with each
segue and
sample.
There are
few things I do well,
the art is one.
Every disc you release to your friends, every mix you tenderly hand to a lover is a gift, a representation of your
soul, and an opportunity to
show off...
…make it count.