MIXTAPES
RAJ
tenacious local 7,782 Posts
Anyone here miss the mixtape? You made a mixtape to give to a girl you had a crush on. You headed over to your homies to make a mixtape of his records. You graffiti'd all over the cassette and made your own cover art with fold out panel. The awful hiss of fourth generation dubs. Rewind, Fast Fwd. Putting scotch tape over the holes so you can overdub for the millionth time because you are too cheap to buy more cassettes. Hearing the old mix bleed through the silence. I miss this shit.
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I have a huge box of old mixtapes that I made at my dad's house. I need to go through them next time I go for a visit.
Yep, those were the days...
I had a slow jams mixtape for girls. Richard Marx for dayz.
i was the little mixtape king in my circle of friends. toiling for hours, knowing that the 1 second overlap pause button edit will be heard, cutting up all my comics and magazines for covers, staying awake at night stressing over playing orders, giving the tapes to girls with all the teenage angst that goes with it, wondering of she 'got it', if she 'really listened' to the tape.
My wife still has a shoebox full of some of my tapes, the cassette player chewed my favorite one just last week.
1991: Some of my boys went away for a year so i made them a gang of tapes to take with them, 2 years later i was macking this girl that knew them from travelling. we were at her place, she puts on some music and it is one of my tapes!
she dug it so much one of my boys had given it to her.
that tape got me laid.
i fuckin love tapes.
A mixtape has a lot of personality, it's like a piece of work and make great gifts, especially if you put some work into the artwork and all that.
Everyone can burn a CD, a tape just has a better feel to it.
- J
I used to make mixtapes when I was in high school. I would do one side, my brother would do the other. Sometimes, I would just make my own mix, trying to flex my cutting skillz.
After the tape was done, my brother & I would toss it in the Sony or Panasonic radio and jam that shit on the back of the bus!
The memories.
I used to make some custom-made mixtapes for friends. I invested quite some time to design the cover (gatefold style+poster inside!)
Funnily enough was talking to one of these friends the other day and he showed me his whole collection of my mixtapes, was about 10 high. Didn't even remember some of the stuff I'd put on there so was like rediscovering my musical interests from 10-12 years ago.
Always loved doing a compilation for the ladies as well, especially the do i/don't i debate over misogynistic but good rap tunes.
One thing I don't miss though is when I used to have almost finished a tape, listened back to it and decided that the first track was all wrong. Rerecording a whole compilation was never a fun time.
One time I made a really raunchy tape as a total joke for a friend I kind of liked and it was intercepted by his mom.
So I got one of my best friends to do the intro (One of his early beats and cutting up of her name using De La's *Jennifer OH Jenny*).
I did a full mix tape with a mix of her fav songs, some of mine and drops from friends of ours. Including DJ X wishing her luck from on his radio show. All in all is was a pretty dope tape. Very Smooth...
And while that gurl and I broke up years later. I still wish I had the tape. Not for anything to do with her. But I'd love to hear the Intro that Serious did for me. Shit was crazy nice!
Would that be Dj Serious??
I basically co-sign on everything that's been said in this thread. Mixtapes were the shit. CDs just don't hold the same weight.
Always made tapes custom for who was getting it and never remembered anything about it once I gave it away. But the girls still love the CD's!!!!!!!!
Used to make "pause" tapes back in the day. Friends used to trip on how everything just mixed right together when all I was useing was a double cassette recorded. You get really good at manually rewinding tapes to just the right point!! And of course I thought I was the only on doing it until I heard stories from people like Mix Master Mike talking about doing the exact same thing.
Ahhhhhhh, the good old days these little munchkins will never know!!
so weird, i was think about this the other day. and this is what the oracle had to say.
did that too, my first tape for a girl. but i didn't help. well, i dunno, was that before or after i s***** *n her t******? aahh, memories....anyone still doing mixtapes? i heard of some dj's still doin it. i wanna do one too now...
Me. I've got a tapedeck in my car. But also, i haven't figure out how to do a digital one...
"Man, remember when CD-Rs were the shit?"
"Yeah! People would make crazy ass inserts and make special art that they'd print ON THE CD ITSELF! You just can't get that with BVXORZ players these days."
"Oh even better was collecting those CD-R mixes with ghetto xeroxed covers and janky felt tip markers from heads back in the day. I still bump DJ Maru's Killin You Softly on the regular! And don't get me started on those speciality 3" CDs! Even if you couldn't play 'em in your car without an adaptor, they were still the shit!"
"Haha, I hear ya! And what about when they eventually rotted over time and became virtually unplayable? Man, trying to recover the music off of that would be a bitch. On top of that, everytime you accidentally scratched it and it started to skip right when your favorite joint was on?? Kids JUST DON'T KNOW!"
"I'm sayin'! And standing in line at Best Buy before it became FYE Best Target-Mart & Noble in the morning to get that 100 spindle of TDK 8x for free after mailing in the rebate?! shiiii..."
and so forth
It's great, because he is a bit of a 'bedroom' DJ, and every so often he will throw me his latest mixjoint on cassette - I love it!
Quite amusing, as he has been known to give a club promoter a cassette mixtape (on a few recent occasions), quite oblivious to the fact that hardly anyone has a cassette player anymore (needless to say, he doesn't get too many gigs)..
ahhh.. god bless him!
It's just easier for me to record onto tape and I still love them.
I also find some pretty good (dusty) tapes around town...
Walt [Mr. Walt, the DJ] points out another interesting sonic situation on Enta da Stage that contributed to the fuzzy, grimy sound of the tracks. "We never brought records into the studio. Everything we sampled was off cassettes. That's why the album sounded like it did. It's not like we consciously tried to do it that way, but we borrowed a lot of the music we sampled, taping it from other people."
No wonder that is one of the muddiest sounding records in hip hop.
yo i gots BVXORZ raers for days!
We traded some mixtapes for a while until she found out how old I was. I had this feeling she was gearing up to come out and visit me. First time I heard Army of Me was on one of her tapes.