What do I mean by The Final Mixes. These are the Final Versions of mixes I've been making for decades. Making mixes from music in my extensive collection has always been one of my favorite pastimes and my way to relax going back fifty years. I made some mixes back when I was in the Navy and we played our music on some of the earliest cassette tape decks. Some of the guys were using reel to reel tape decks. Most of our shipmates were putting albums on tapes while they were home and brought them to sea where turntables were not very useful. Back then a few times I just put a bunch of songs on a tape.
Later at the house on Seymour Street one of my friends had a tape deck and we put a few songs on a tape to play when we had a party. Most of the time we always played records on the turntable but when people were over for a party and dancing the turntable would constantly skip. No furniture worked. We actually built a shelf attached to the wall so the records wouldn't skip when people danced... which was a lot when we had parties. So we had a few mixtapes back in the late 70's. I had a group of mixtapes ready to play for our wedding in 1980 and from then on I became making mixes obsessed.
I've written about making mixes a few times on this blog.
I stopped collecting new music when I retired in 2016. I got a subscription to Spotify to keep up and listen to new releases. I also began at that time to seriously explore my music collection that I had amassed over the fast fifty years. My goal was to immerse myself in those thousands of albums I had obsessively collected.
So over the past six years and especially when the pandemic arrived and impacted on everything. I found different ways to explore my collection and to make more mixes. One new thing was to make mega mixes where I would string together many mixes that would go on for many many hours. Eight to twenty hours each. The idea was that I could put on a mix and just leave it play all day while I did other things around the house. It was like having my own personal non commercial no talking radio station with only the music I liked and wanted playing. I also put these mega mixes on flash drives that could be played in the car and used for our long all day drives to Philly with no need pick out a tape or CD to play. The original idea of the mega mix was something that I could put on as we left the driveway and didn't need to change or think about until we got to Katie's house.
I then discovered that the mega mixes were fine in some situations but I really missed having the much shorter focused mixes that I had been putting together for so many decades. I also realized that at this stage of my life I wasn't going to be doing this for much longer. I decided it was time to make those final mixes.
So the Final Mixes are my final legacy of mixes. My last and final collection of mixes that will probably take me a couple of years to complete. Each mix will run a little over an hour and a half. Why that amount of time? It's a good time. Not too long, not too short. Brief but substantial also long enough to explore with the familiar and the not something I've heard so many times. It's room enough for the hits and for the deep cuts of any time period or theme.
Each of my various categories I've created over the years will have a new Final Mix version. I've started with my Songs by Year mixes. I'm also working on some Night Chill mixes. There will be lots more and I'm putting them on flash drives. I'm also putting them up as Spotify playlists and adding them to this blog with links to Spotify. I've posted some to a Facebook mix group. This is a process that I started this year.
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