The concept of the mega mix grew on me over the past few years when I was combining many of my genre and category mixes into larger playlists on my iPod for playing in the car. I was starting to be very happy about lifting the time restrictions of the CD mix and rethinking the process. I was also using Spotify for listening to a lot of music at home. Especially new releases.
I initially starting reworking my mixes into an hour and a half format. I had read somewhere that 90 minute playlist was the ideal amount of time. I made a bunch of hour and a half mixes but it still seemed like an artificial time constraint. Soon I was putting together combinations of old mixes into about five hours sets. I liked the idea of putting something on and then forgetting about it for awhile and just let it play.
I began to see that there was no artistic value to limiting the size of the playlist although there were some situations where a targeted time frame made sense. However, overall more is always better. IMHO.
The next step was making still larger mixes... the mega mix. Now I make mixes that are usually somewhere between 8 and 8 and a half hours. The motive was my regular driving trips between Buffalo and Philadelphia which is usually 8 hours or so. Now that I'm retired I often put on mix on in the house and let it play all day. An 8 hour mix can also be shuffled but that's another post.
In the past year I also focused on putting mixes on flash drives using with the media player in the car but that presented a different set of problems that would need to be worked out in the file process.
So I started assembling the mega mixes by taking and combining several related mixes. Initially they were several mixes line up but then I saw I needed to make some edits and smooth out many of the transitions. I also liked to shuffled these large mixes but then again that all had to work.
I eventually settled on the approximately 8 hour mix because of the long drive between Buffalo and Philadelphia I make several times a year. I also liked to put a large mix on my iPod, play it and forget about changing it all day. I think it was probably Spotify that got me used to long playlists.
I began to systematically go through my collection of mixes and create the mega mixes. I used the existing categories such as the Decade mixes and the Covers sets to start with. I also took the Reflections series and re-categorized them into the Decade 6.
I was also very careful to space artists throughout the mix, to consider the adjacent years of songs and to make sure a song was not used more than once in the series category.
Related posts.
- Mega Mix Process
- The Categories
- Art of the Shuffle
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