Creative Mixtaping: My Guidelines for Making an Effective Modern Mixtape

I'm about to give away all my mixtaping secrets. 

I have never watched the 2000 movie High Fidelity all the way through, but there’s a famous scene where the main character discusses his “mixtape rules”, or the subtle art of making a compilation tape. He comes off as kind of snobby, like who calls a mixtape a “compilation tape”, really? But you know, he gets it. He knows that making a mixtape is a very subtle art. Nearly a lost art. Kind of a useless skill in today’s society unless you can make a living being some sort of DJ. And usually your only audience is yourself. It’s a very solitary, almost lonely hobby. With few exceptions, it’s mostly only neurodivergent weirdos like me that are still using cassettes in the 2020s. But that’s okay because it means cassettes are cheap and plentiful, unlike say, vinyl. He also points out that you’re using someone else’s art to make your own art (in a way that I would argue requires more creativity than AI “art”, just to clarify) and that's a very delicate thing, as he puts it. There might be planning stages. Afterwards you might need to make edits. You might want the case to have pretty art on it. The whole process of recording a mixtape might take much longer than the 90-120 minutes that make up the length of the cassette. He doesn't go into his rules too deeply, perhaps because the movie would be too boring for normal people who just slap their playlists together willy-nilly. The movie is based on a book though, that might go into more detail. I should pick it up sometime.

As an aside, making a mixtape takes a lot more thought and creativity than a playlist because you have time limits. It’s like writing a sonnet, you have to be creative within the constraints of the medium, and that pushes you to make choices you might not otherwise make. You have to make sure the best songs make it on the tape, so you eliminate the less-good tracks. And you have to keep in mind that skipping any of the tracks on a cassette takes the effort of fast-forwarding, not to mention the possibility of wear and tear on your equipment and the tape itself, so it's best to make it listenable all the way through, whereas with a playlist, like the mix CDs that preceded them, you can skip around with ease. Now that said, I've made lots of great, very long playlists on YouTube using much the same logic I use to make mixtapes, so I'm not knocking playlists as a medium. But mixtapes are far more concentrated. Even the two-hour ones. 

The mixtape rules from High Fidelity seem to be as follows, and I'm paraphrasing:

1. You start out with a "banger", a hook, something that slaps, that grab's the listener's attention, a high-energy, fast paced track.

2. You follow up with a song that's almost as much of a banger but not quite. Maybe it's just a little slower, a little less heavy, or what have you.

3. The third track has to slow things down. It has to be something more relaxing. You don't want to "blow your wad", as he says. (Gross)

He then goes into how personal it is to make a mixtape for someone else, you really have to know the person through-and-through. I have done that in the past but not often. If I make a mix for someone it’s hard not to just shove my musical tastes down their throat, honestly. He's right about that being challenging. In the movie he’s making a mixtape for a girl he likes, so his approach makes sense, you wouldn’t want to get too experimental with your mix in that case. 

My personal rules are a bit different. This is one way you can start a tape, and I've used this method often, long before ever watching this scene. But you might also want to start slow and work your way up, in a slow burn. If you're already listening to a cassette you're in it for the long haul anyway. Or you can throw some voice samples in there first (easy to do these days if you have a cassette deck with an aux port and can record straight off YouTube), or start with a stirring instrumental opener, whatever strikes your fancy. In fact, my most recent tape "Tropical Twilight" starts with this very scene from High Fidelity, which I recorded onto the cassette, and then I use his method. 

These are my mixtape rules. Or rather, more like guidelines. They can always be broken if the situation calls for it. 

I. The Brainstorming Phase and Types of Mixtapes

So, you've been hearing some great music lately and want to put it on a tape. Or, you noticed some of those new songs have similar themes or sounds to them as older songs you know, and you want to hear how they would sound synchronized back-to-back. Maybe you have a tape series that you add to at the same time every year, or every ten tapes perhaps. Then it becomes something you look forward to, something special. 

My mixtapes fall into a variety of categories:

1. The Radio Mixtape: 

Ah, the old tradition. How they did it way back in the 1900s. Sitting there for hours waiting for the radio to play a song you like, hoping the DJ doesn't talk over it too much. Nearly impossible to do a Themed Tape this way, except for maybe the genre type (more on that below), you don’t have much control beyond just deciding when to hit record. My first tapes were this type. I must confess I don't really have the patience to do these anymore. I mostly stopped doing these around the time emo got popular and all my favorite rock stations went to crap, leaving me to become a metalhead. Even if I were to find a decent rock radio station around here, it would only be stuff I've heard a million times, and unlike some people my age I always crave new music. 

Now there IS a newer method of doing these that I should mention. There's an app called Radio Garden, which I wrote about before, that lets you access radio stations around the world, some of them internet-based. There are actual goth stations on there, amazingly. If you have a boombox with an aux port, you can record straight to cassette from this app too. I did four mixtapes over the course of a couple years using this method, but again I ran into many of the same problems. Even a lot of the goth radio stations play stuff I've heard a million times, it’s just Sisters of Mercy instead of Nirvana. I would get lucky every now and then, like once I recorded a radio show of nothing but remixes of Velvet Acid Christ songs from a station in Scotland. But it takes more time and patience than I have these days, and for not much payoff in the end. Every time I do another of these I remember why I don’t do them anymore. I like the idea of recording a Radio Mixtape better than actually recording the mixtape. I get all my new music off YouTube anyway. 

Above: The radio mixtape I recorded during my 2015 trip to Armenia. Maybe the most important mixtape of this type that I have ever done. Which amazingly YouTube let me upload without any copyright hassle.

2. The Year Tape: 

At the beginning of the year, I select a two-hour tape, and each month I add two songs to it. My top two songs of that month. This gives me ten minutes a month to work with. Often there is extra room at the end of the tape because two songs don’t usually add up to ten minutes, which I'll then fill with some #3 songs that didn't make the cut previously. I've been doing my Year Tapes in this orderly manner since 2004, before that I wasn't adhering to any sort of rules, they were just tapes I could do whatever I wanted to all year. Anyway, listening to Year Tapes back-to-back can be a nice, abridged retelling of your life. 

Above: My Year Tapes from 1999 to about 2022. I switched from the Gregorian calendar to the Ancient Armenian calendar back in 2010/4502. The first four I recorded sometime in 2005 because the originals didn't adhere to my new Year Tape rules (2003 sorta does so I didn't remake that one)

3. The Theme Mixtape: 

So, you want a tape where all the songs are all about vampires, or the Moon, or the ancient Egyptian afterlife? Or all the same genre, subject, theme, language, mood or time period? Maybe they're all covers, or maybe they all came out in 1984? Then you make a Theme Tape. You're putting songs together that all have something in common, in order to make a statement or tell a story. I've shared many of these on my blog before. These tapes can be loads of gimmicky fun, but they can even be therapeutic, especially if they're mood-based. You might start out with sad songs or angry songs and very gradually work your way into happier songs, leaving yourself in a better mood afterwards. You can also do the opposite, but you probably don't want to (though there's something to be said for ending Side B with beautiful melancholy after an upbeat tape, if you do it just right). Walk yourself through the Five Stages of Grief if need be. It's like alchemy, transmutation magic.

Above: Nosferatunes, the aforementioned vampire tape. I included voice clips from the 1932 Dracula and the Castlevania anime throughout. There’s a corresponding playlist too if you want to hear it. And those missing videos on the playlist are still preserved on my tape, yay physical media.

4. The Audiobiography: 

The soundtrack to your life. My life has a soundtrack, it just happens to span over 300 cassettes (I've been doing this for 25 years). These could be "current hits" or songs you were into over the last month or two, or it could be the music that got you through a significant life event, good or bad. You can do them for events that happened years ago too but it's better if it's fresh. That said, I've made some tapes about my childhood that really captured my nostalgia. Put some songs you haven't heard in years on there, it's like a time machine. 

Above: Audiobiography: The 20s - Part II. I wrote about this series of tapes before. This is a specific type where each 90 minute tape covers five years of my life, that’s 18 minutes for each year. I’m doing the next one when I’m 40. 

5. The Random Mix:

 I usually do these as CD mixes for the car, but I've done a couple tapes like this too. Just throw whatever random songs you have into a blender and see what comes of it. Record from an MP3 player or very long playlist and hit shuffle. You might even get some accidental synchronicity. Thing is, the end result probably won't be something you'll want to go back and listen to very often. Radio Mixtapes can fall under this category too sometimes. I've started to do another sub-type too in recent years, where if a song has to be eliminated from a mixtape for time I put it instead on a Random Mix. I might finish the tape over the course of two to four months, only adding a few songs each sitting. These end up being a lot more listenable.

Above: Heart-Shaped Casket, my most recent of the latter type. I found out when you slow Alvin and the Chipmunks down they sound like either post-punk or sludge metal depending on the song, but I still felt like keeping it off my mainline mixtapes.

6. Not Really a Mixtape:

This covers the other stuff you might record on a cassette; bootlegged live shows, full albums, dictation, etc.  

Once you’ve chosen what type of mix you want to make, you can start planning the track listing. For the modern cassette enthusiast, it might be a good idea to make a playlist on your streaming website of choice, listen to it few times, perfect it and decide what songs go best together, and time all the songs to make sure they’ll all fit on the tape and nothing gets cut off mid-song. But there’s also something to be said for the little surprises you get by just going in blind. Sometimes I’ll start with a batch of 30 or so new songs, knowing they’re not all going to fit, and just go with what song sounds good after the previous one until I’m done. And with this method, I even be inspired to hunt down a song I hadn’t thought of during the planning stages that would go perfect after another song. Patterns will emerge sometimes that I hadn’t anticipated. Sometimes it will start to tell a story.

II. Choosing a Cassette to Record On

Once you've decided on what you want your tape to be, you'll need to select a cassette. This can be more complicated than you think. You'll need to decide on the length you want (the standard lengths are 60, 90, and 120, with some more rare lengths out there). You'll hear people caution against using the 120-minute tapes. Just be careful with them and don't needlessly rewind or fast-forward them, and make sure the heads in your tape deck are clean, and you'll probably be fine, I've rarely had issues with them. You do kind of sacrifice quality for quantity though. 90 minutes is a good length for an average mixtape, you don’t want to pick a tape that’s too long and end up using filler songs to finish it. 60 minutes is too short in my opinion, you might as well make a mix CD which is 80 minutes, but I do use those tapes for things in the "Not Really a Mixtape" category. 

If your supply is low, then you might not have much choice. But I've amassed enough recorded blank cassettes from thrift stores and other places to keep me busy for years, even at two mixtapes a month like I usually do, and I have tons of variety. These days because no one really makes them anymore it's cheaper to record over used cassettes from a thrift store, as sealed blanks can be expensive online. You can digitize them first if they have anything interesting on them (like I found a wrestling show from the 1970s once), but usually it's grandpa’s old country gospel music or something lame like that. If you're lucky enough to have some sealed blanks though, you'll want to save them for special occasions, not just any old mix. 

You might also make choices based on appearance. For instance, the Memorex dBS always gives me nostalgia because they were the first tapes I ever recorded on, so mostly I use those tapes for nostalgic mixes (see below). But sometimes a certain brand of cassette just has the energy you're looking to evoke with your mix. Cassettes come in Type I, the standard, Type II, which has better sound quality (but can be harder to record over unless you erase it completely with a magnet), and the mythical Type IV metal tapes with the best sound quality; if you find one of these, treasure it. They're rare and expensive. I have only found two in all my years of collecting. (Not sure what happened to Type III). As for brands, stick to the well-known ones. Avoid Tonemaster, or anything else that looks cheaply-made. And be careful recording on the really old tapes. The best quality tapes are from the 80s to early 90s, during the cassette’s heyday. I'm too nervous to record on anything older than the 1980s myself. Which brings me to another point: make sure your tape is intact and mold-free before you jeopardize your equipment. Make sure the little spongey pad on top is there. If the magnetic tape has white stuff on it or looks crusty, it's moldy and best throw it away unless it was important, because if it gets in your cassette deck the mold will spread to every tape you play in it thereafter. It's not impossible to clean but not usually worth it either. This happens more with VHS tapes, but I've seen it happen to audio cassettes. None of mine of course, because I wouldn’t store my tapes in a damp basement for 40 years only to give it to a thrift store, like some people.

Above: One of my most recent mixtapes, Allstars Գ, on a Memorex dBS. Yes, I'm on Armenian numerals now, this is the third tape in a new series. I started with positive numbers, then negative numbers, and now Armenian numerals. I'm a nerd. I do an Allstars tape every ten tapes. The music on it is mostly new or at least new to me, but between the songs I wedged old radio station bumpers from the 90s that I got off my old tapes so it sounds like I recorded it off the radio. Fun times were had. 

III. Picking a Title

Now you might have already gone into this with a title in mind, or you might be flying blind and only decide on a title once you're done, so this step is flexible. I find it best to go into it with a title already in mind, because that will give you a direction you want to take the mix in, like the thesis statement in an essay. I always try to come up with something catchy and creative, something that rhymes or uses alliteration or wordplay. Some common inspirations include the weather, the time of year, something going on in my life. Foreign titles are good too; everything sounds cooler in German. You can also name it after a song on the tape, which is less creative but effective nonetheless if you think it's a good title for the whole tape. I came up with "Allstars" when I was 12 and have kept it out of tradition, even though it's not a terrific title and makes me think of that song by Smash Mouth. Some good titles I've come up with for my mixtapes over the years include "Tropical Twilight", "A Gothic Romance", "Black is Not Dark Enough", "The Hermit", "Eclipse" (recorded during the eclipse in April 2024), "Cold Caress", "November Embers", "Humid Gloom", "The Forest of Ghosts", “Dreamweaver”, “Instrumental Illness”, "Nosferatunes", "The Abyss", “The Gates of Duat”, “The Style is Death”, "WelTraum" (Weltraum is German for universe, but it also contains the word "traum" meaning dream, I always just thought that was cool). 

Naming it something like "(Insert your name here)'s Mix" or "Awesome Mix" like in Guardians of the Galaxy is amateurish, if I may be so blunt. Not that I don't have my share of old mixtapes with bad titles myself (yeah I know, Michael's Music/Suren's Songs), but they're from my teen years, when I was an amateur.

A sampling of titles from my cassette drawers. Which one would you pick first?

IV. Building the Track Listing

Now we’ve finally caught up with the guy from High Fidelity. You can use his “hook, follow-up and chill out” method for the first three tracks, if you want, but the possibilities are endless. You may have already gone through most of this process if you built a playlist first. Here are my personal dos and don’ts:

1. Repeating a Band

Ideally you want to wait at least three tracks minimum before repeating a band, and that’s pushing it. Overcrowding a mixtape with one band is bad form. That is, unless two songs from the same band are just perfect together or fade into one another in a way that makes them hard to separate, that’s why these are guidelines and not rules. Another exception can be made if you use a really long song in between two songs by the same band. It also can be done, obviously, if you’re making some sort of “Best of” mix (which I guess would be a type of Themed Mixtape). But typically, if a band you like releases a new album and you just have to have a bunch of their songs on your mixtape, space it out at least, and save some for the next mixtape.

2. Maintaining Tone

Imagine, listening to calm, relaxing meditation music, and all the sudden a black metal scream pierces the air and gives you a heart attack. If you want to change the tone of the tape, you need to transition. This is an extreme example but you can have meditation music and black metal on the same tape, as long as you work your way up to it. The trick is finding those transitional songs that bridge the gap. It might take several songs but you’ll get there. I’ve noticed putting voice samples between the songs can speed up the process a bit though, causing a kind of energetic soft reset. And the transition from Side A to Side B can be a good point to change tone, but you don’t want too drastic of a change or it will be like two different tapes. 

3. Editing in Post

You can always edit the tape if you come across a song later that would have been perfect for your Themed Mixtape if only you had known about it, or if you decide you don’t like a song or just want to rearrange the track listing, but remember to time the song you’re recording over so it doesn’t go over the next song too (the easiest way is to just look the song up online so you don’t have to sit there with a stop watch). Unless you’re just going to rerecord the whole rest of the side after that point (happens sometimes). I would caution against doing this on a Type II tape or a Type IV tape, because often the eraser head on your cassette deck won’t be strong enough and you’ll still hear the song you recorded over faintly in the background (this is why I purchased a magnetic bulk tape eraser, to record over used Type IIs; even then though it erases the entire tape, which you might not want to do if you’re just taping over one song).

Only go against these guidelines if you think you can get away with it.

V. Utilizing Your Space

Some people will leave several minutes of blank space at the end of the tape. I find this maddening. Very lazy and wasteful. It might be unavoidable for there to be a minute or so of blank space at the end, not quite long enough for a full song, but I like to find filler when this happens. Look for a really short song, an instrumental track that you don’t mind being cut off, maybe some rain sound effects, or some sort of voice sample. If you have a cassette voice recorder you can even put your own voice on the tape and pretend you’re a DJ. People leave blank space on their tapes to solve the opposite problem though, having a song cut off at the end of the tape when you run out of room. I try to be mindful of how much tape is left as I record so this doesn’t happen. You can bridge a song from Side A to Side B if worst comes to worst, but it’s not ideal and should be avoided. If you take the effort before recording to add up the times of all the songs so that you know what will fit on the tape this problem can be easily avoided, but keep in mind sometimes the times on the tapes aren’t exact, you might even find them to be a minute or two longer than they say they are. I don’t always plan my mixes out so meticulously because sometimes I like to be spontaneous, but it does work. 

VI: Cataloging and Decorating Your Mixtape

The label on the inside of a cassette case is called a J-Card, and will usually feature rows of lines for you to write down your track listing, maybe a space for the recording date and the method of recording, and space for your title on the spine. This is the standard, but sometimes I’ll draw something on them instead. See my Wizard of Oz Character Study tapes for an example. You can make your own J-Card too if you want it to be more artistic. If you’re really tech-savvy and good at graphic design, you can even print something out and make it look professional. The titles should be written in a legible font. I like to do fancy fonts on mine sometimes, or even create my own sort of logo for the tape and incorporate little drawings. 

Cataloging your mixtapes is important for organization. I keep a notebook to jot down the track lists of my tapes, so if it ever gets lost or eaten up I can remake it. Some people make spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel, but nothing beats pen and paper. You can also note where the tape might sound warped, or where it was eaten up in the past (assuming it survived the ordeal). I also number my tapes, so I know what chronological order they were recorded in at a glance. Some of the old blanks give you a space on the spine of the J-card for a number, but most don’t. 

You will probably want to stick to normal Arabic numerals, but I like to overcomplicate things. My numbering system might be strange to outsiders but I’ll explain. When I was a teen, I vowed that after I reached 100 mixtapes, I was going to stop. This happened in 2004, and I did stop for about a year and a half. But I just couldn’t stay away from mixtaping. So in 2006 I started going into negative numbers, to sidestep my earlier vow. I was a lot less prolific in my 20s, doing one tape every two months on average, so I didn’t reach -100 until 2018. You could say I had 0 mixtapes at that point since the negative numbers cancelled out the positive ones. I had no plans on stopping this time, so I started using Armenian Numerals after a short break. I reached 100 (Ճ) on that series just a few months ago after five years, but I’m going to just keep going with the Armenian Numeral series until I die at this point. I thought about switching to Roman numerals, Ancient Egyptian numerals or cuneiform numerals, but they take up too much room. 

Here are a few of my prettiest J-cards: 

Top two (The Masquerade and Coffin Classics) came from fliers I found at a gothic nightclub, The Castle in Tampa, Florida, and cut and folded into makeshift J-cards. Then we have Satan from the movie The Adventures of Mark Twain on the cover of a tape where every song is Satanic (fun times were had), Music Nonstop with the Goddess Hathor (as she appears in my webcomic of course) and the God Nehebkau, and a doomer on the cover of a tape of Russian post-punk.

After this step, you’re pretty much done. I wait at least three days before giving it the first listen-through, so it’s still fresh in my mind, but not entirely. That’s when you might do your edits too. So the tape is not really complete until after the first listen.

I often ponder the question of who is going to be listening to these tapes after I’m gone. Where will these cassettes be in 100 years? Are they destined for a landfill? Will they get erased in a gigantic solar flare? Detonated in a nuclear blast? Or will they become family heirlooms? Sold off to collectors? Maybe even fossilized and discovered by future archeologists. Probably not the latter two, at least some of them if not all of them are probably destined for the landfill after enough years go by, and it will be like I never existed, but I can dream. I feel like I have uploaded my consciousness onto these tapes. They contain my memories. If I were to lose them it would be like having amnesia. But if someone plays them after I’m gone, I will live again.