On Making a Perfect Mix

"Now, the making of a good compilation tape is a very subtle art. Many do's and don'ts. First of all you're using someone else's poetry to express how you feel. This is a delicate thing."
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

High Fidelity is one of my all-time top five favorite movies.  Well, top ten at least.  With a bullet.  In it, John Cusack’s Rob Gordon struggles endlessly through a sea of his own blind permanent adolescent behavior, on a quest to get back his best ex girl ever, Laura.

It’s a great movie, great lines, great monologues, great characters, great soundtrack.  And it has one of the scenes which, mostly by accident, has taken up far more of my creative man-hours over the years than I’d care to admit to just anyone.

So I’ll just admit it to the web.

A cursory glance around at my fellow internet-publishers reveals that a surprising (to me at least) number of people have already weighed in on Rob Gordon and the scene I have in mind, the scene where he begins laying out his mix tape formula.  It’s a tantalizingly cut-short monologue on the dos and dont’s of making a good mix tape, or mix CD if you’re in the 21^st century.  Rather than rehash old ground, I’ll leave it to you to watch the movie, seriously go get a copy, and move on to making my point.

For some reason, I love making mix CDs when the mood strikes me.  In generally begins with hearing a new song on the radio, or an old song from my library I’ve forgotten about, and hearing it as the first track of a new mix.  No sooner have I thought “wow, this would make a good mix CD,” than I’m off to start shuffling through my other songs and trying to find the right balance of tones, attention-grabbers, and inside jokes for the people in mind to get it right.

I hit shuffle, skip through my library, and add songs that might fit.  I try to skip songs I’ve used before, I try to skip songs that strongly belong to the album they come from (no Pink Floyd for example, taking one of their songs out of context for me is like taking the middle 40 seconds out of Good Vibrations and slapping it between the segments of two other songs, but to each his own).  Soon I’ll have something like thirty or forty tracks piled up, and as this is more than twice the number I’m likely to be able to keep, I stop adding and start subtracting.

The feel of the mix will start to come through from the combination of tones the songs make from playing with each other.  It’s a tricky thing to describe, but in addition to certain songs which turn out to sound great when they come after other songs (good transitions), there’s something of a cumulative vibe that builds up when the right songs are put in the right order.  Or at least so it seems at the time.  So I combine the songs by playing them back to back, or skipping back and forth between them, and trying to nail down a rough order that the key tracks, the ones that leapt out at me most strongly, should go in.

Once I start getting a feel for the mix, whether it’s mostly playful or soulful or moody or pensive, I can more easily take those songs which don’t fit away.  Soon I’ve got a list that will fit onto a CD, but this is all the work of an evening.  It’s at this stage that the work really begins.  

The next step is to listen to it.  My job allows headphones and I don’t have to listen to anything in particular to do it well, so I’ve got a lot of time for listening on my hands.  I put the thing on repeat and see what occurs to me.  Over time, connections will grow tighter and the feel will get stronger, and then odd corners and tracks that don’t really work where they are, or at all, will become apparent.  I’ll add a track here, switch a few around there, listen to it again, and continue to tinker.  I’ll work on these things for days or weeks if I have to, just to be sure that I’ve got it right.  In the end I almost certainly listen to it more times than the person I wind up giving it to, but that’s almost beside the point.

What I’m after in doing this is what the fictional version of composer Antonio Salieri in the play and film Amadeus calls perfection.  That is, that state of accomplishment wherein no improving change can any longer be made.

Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall.

If I feel as though I’ve really nailed a mix, and I give it to the person and they don’t really take to it, well it’s odd to say that it doesn’t bother me as much as would giving it to them when I felt like it could still be made better.

I’ve just remembered I said I would get to my point.

Making mix CDs is incredibly helpful for my creative life.  If I’m down, or feel like I can’t do much to get into the mood of making something new, simply sitting down and tinkering out a few songs that work well together has almost never failed to lift my spirits somewhat, even if I don’t always pursue it to that degree of fervency described above in quest of each mix’s perfect version.  In the end, creating a collage is never the most original of creative endeavor, because the material you start with is the work of other people, but being able to say “that sounds good because I put those songs in that order” is a simple and straightforward way to feel recalled to life in a creative sense.  We can make something out of something else; even if it’s not new, it can still be enjoyable and worthwhile.

The line Rob draws in the scene about how to make a perfect mix tape is that there are many rules, more than you’d expect, many subtle dos and don’ts.  Like many of us, over the years, I’ve made my fair share of mix CDs for friends and loved ones, and I’ve played around a lot with the idea of finishing the formula that Rob begins to talk us through before cutting himself off.  I’ve more or less nailed what I think is the perfect formula, at least for me, for the kinds of tracks to use for a good mix, how many to have on hand, and in what order to use them.  I’m sure I’m not the only blogger who’s tried to extrapolate on his advice, so I will not bore you with the details, but there’s something about the idea of rules that I’ve found relevant time after time.

There's a lot of ways to write an essay.  Ultimately I think the test of whether or not an essay is worth reading is whether you can clearly tell what the person was trying to say, and whether or not they said it clearly, and clearly gave good reasons for saying it.  In middle school, and for the rest of time, many are taught and judged by the three-by-five template of essay composition (introduction, body, body, body, conclusion -- no more details than that here or I might start getting flashbacks).  This patten of how to structure your paragraphs works fine, as far as it goes, but it can be followed to the letter and that won't guarantee that the essay is well-written, or that its arguments are clearly understood.  Likewise, a good essay can look nothing like this and still be comprehensible, even convincing.

There are also many, many, many different ways to craft a story.  There are probably at least as many approaches to the art as there are stories themselves.  In 9^th grade english, I learned about plot diagrams: here you have the exposition, then the inciting incident!  Rising actin follows, culminating in the climax!  Then falling action, I'm still not sure exactly what that really means, and the denouement wraps things up.  As neat and tidy an exam question as the three-by-five essay format, and about as relevant and helpful to actually making a story feel real and alive as internet map directions are to actually enjoying your vacation.  They may keep you from getting lost, but relying on them alone won’t get you there.

Later in the movie, Rob is again working on a mix tape.  But instead of putting together things from his library that he thinks work well together, he’s working to make a tape especially for Laura, one that she would enjoy because of who she is and what her tastes are.  It makes me happy to say that this advice has been more valuable to me in the things I’ve tried to make up on my own than any of the hints about rules and perfections mentioned earlier in the picture.  When you sit down to create something, and you know who you’re creating it for will just love it, it’s one of the best feelings in the world.

The best thing I think someone who wanted to make a really good mix CD could do is to take in Rob’s advice, if we could hear all of it (or take mine), and do their best to make a CD or two that followed his rules to the letter, and then throw the rules away and make the CD that they actually want.

Most often, the rules of a creative challenge serve us best when they show us where we could go if we wanted to, but are never compelled to go if something else suits us better.

Restrictions can be great as a starting point, but don't be afraid to ditch them and find something new once you find surprises in the material leading you in another direction.

When you get a picture stuck in your head, or something a person says, or a strange idea that makes sense only when you think about it a certain way, then that’s your first track.  That’s where your story starts.  From there, the only rule you really need is to keep going and see where it leads you.