Mixtapes: Leaving room at the end vs. cutting songs off

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Banal, but I'm sure we're up for it.

Personaly, I try my very hardest to squeeze short songs on the end of a side, but often i'll just let something cut off. I hate those spaces at the end, unless you flip it exactly where it ends and begin recording side 2 at that spot.

Audiophiles with fancy 'faders' need not respond.

― roger adultery (roger adultery), Friday, 25 July 2003 20:40 (twenty-two years ago)

leave room at the end. getting a song cut off when i'm in the middle of it tends to piss me off, and ruins the vibe.

and mixtapes are what dj mixers are for.

― Kingfish (Kingfish), Friday, 25 July 2003 21:01 (twenty-two years ago)

i guess that's just the hard part of making a mix tape

― ddd (ddd), Friday, 25 July 2003 21:12 (twenty-two years ago)

The experienced mix maker will do neither.

― Kenan Hebert (kenan), Friday, 25 July 2003 21:18 (twenty-two years ago)

This is what 30 second long songs were invented for.

― The Lex (The Lex), Friday, 25 July 2003 22:19 (twenty-two years ago)

The experienced mix maker will do neither.

True dat.

― Andrew Frye (paul cox), Friday, 25 July 2003 22:22 (twenty-two years ago)

yeah i never do either unless it's a song i specifically want to cut off before the end. good records for filling up bits that are too short to fit a whole song in : "songs of the humpback whale", "sky yen", "metal machine music", train records (you know! TRAIN RECORDS!)

― duane, Saturday, 26 July 2003 03:57 (twenty-two years ago)

If there's 1 minute left Throw Down by Dinosaur Jr was my solution - all 51 seconds of it.

If its 1- 2 minutes then Felt have a number of fine songs that fit.

― tigerclawskank, Monday, 28 July 2003 13:34 (twenty-two years ago)

I usually set up a quick spreadsheet with all the track times in it. I make sure that theres very little "air" left at the end of each side.
Also, tracks by the Minutemen (and especially the Descendants) are great side closers because they are so damned short.
CDR's remove this problem almost entirely, as the music stops the instant the last track ends. (But, yes, "empty space" on a CDR is the devils playground, ergo, I squeeze as much as humanly possible. Roxio allows you you squeeze 703.12 mb per CD, and I've come pretty damned close.)

― Lord Custos Epsilon (Lord Custos Epsilon), Monday, 28 July 2003 15:03 (twenty-two years ago)

you just have to have mystical True Knowledge of the Tape Length. 90% of the time i finish out a mix with less than 30 seconds left without resorting to 30 or 60 second times.

(i'm teaching courses in how to do this at the learning annex, if anyone's interested.)

― your null fame (yournullfame), Monday, 28 July 2003 15:19 (twenty-two years ago)

I'll never cut-off a song just to fit the constraints of a tape and even a few too many seconds of dead tape pisses me off. I can't tell you just how many "half-tapes" i have had to redo; you know, the whole song progression is perfect and you need to dip way back into the mix to substitute something with either a shorther or longer duation. I'm terribly exact when it comes to my mix tapes and subsequetly, doubt that any tape-end dead space takes up more than, say, 8-10 seconds.

I do, however, bend to rules as the situation requires; I've sliced-off the last two lines from Roxy Music's Love Is The Drug -- damn if it don't sound better anyways.

As long as it sounds right -- and it ain't done unitl it sounds right -- so, to answer your question; NEITHER.

― christoff (christoff), Monday, 28 July 2003 15:21 (twenty-two years ago)

Here's the magic trick: Use CoolEdit and turn the tail end of the song into a long fade-out, so that the song dies off before the tape runs out.

― Lord Custos Epsilon (Lord Custos Epsilon), Monday, 28 July 2003 15:23 (twenty-two years ago)

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Monday, 28 July 2003 15:40 (twenty-two years ago)

sometimes little trax
sometimes leave zen space to chill
sometimes cut it off*

*best if song is crap;
or hit pause quick, continue
track on other side

― Haikunym, Monday, 28 July 2003 15:47 (twenty-two years ago)

I like stashing singular tiny tracks from Money Mark's first album onto the end of mix-tapes, especially right after big monstrous epic-jams style climactic uber-songs.

― nickalicious (nickalicious), Monday, 28 July 2003 15:50 (twenty-two years ago)

"CoolEdit" - is that your name for the input level knob on thee tape recorder? just look hard at the tape as it spools, combine with a brght light, a steady hand, and a dash of mystical tape-length knowledge, that's how i always do it
Naw. Edit first, record second. It's kinda like how carpenters always admonish you to "measure twice and cut once."

― Lord Custos Epsilon (Lord Custos Epsilon), Monday, 28 July 2003 15:52 (twenty-two years ago)

The trouble is, you can time all of your music out to 30 minutes or 45 minutes to the dot, but in reality, the tapes themselves are usually a little long, by about twenty or so seconds. So you're still going to have dead space even if you meticulously timed everything out.

My solutions:
A.) "Hidden" songs sound silly on CDs since you can see them coming as soon as you put the disc in. However, on tapes, you can make them come out of nowhere. I used to put in some jarring reprise of a guitar chord at the very end to wake me up on long road trips. On my cassette copy of "Slanted & Enchanted", I just looped "Wounded Kite" over and over again.

B.) If your stereo is hooked up to the TV, you can click through the stations and get some interesting soundbites to fill time with.

C.) I've got a .wav that Harry Nilsson recorded for one of his eight-track albums. It's basically him for thirty seconds explaining that to keep the continuity of the album intact and not have it click to Side Four or whatever in the middle of a song, he was recording this short interlude. That works. I've also got a White Album bootleg that Ringo made for Peter Sellers. At the end, in the middle of a whole lotta feedback, Ringo screams "I say if you want to hear more music, you've got to turn the tape over!"

― Pleasant Plains (Pleasant Plains), Monday, 28 July 2003 16:01 (twenty-two years ago)

http://artofthemix.org/writings/guide.asp

booya.

― J (Jay), Monday, 28 July 2003 16:09 (twenty-two years ago)

Back in the 80s, a bud of mine would use snippets from those "teach your kids to read books" as to warn you that that side of the tape was ending.
- Second to last song
- "When you hear this sound (*sparkly magic wand waving noise*) you'll know its time to turn the page..."
- Last song...
- (*sparkly magic wand waving noise*)
- 10 seconds of silence
- "...okay, turn the tape over now..."

― Lord Custos Epsilon (Lord Custos Epsilon), Monday, 28 July 2003 16:31 (twenty-two years ago)

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