Dreamy Sounds Mixtape

07 Nov, 2024

This past summer I created a mixtape called "Dreamy Sounds" - complete with custom printed cover art and track listing - even a label for the cassette itself!

The idea for this mixtape started with two songs: "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" Nancy Sinatra and "Wicked Games" by Chris Isaak. Both songs have a combination of jangly and wailing guitars, while Isaak's voice has a haunting quality to it. Beyond those first two songs, I didn't have a strong direction on where I wanted to go, but I had the aesthetic.

Being a little stumped I took to Mastodon to field suggestions, and I got plenty. I kept adding the suggestions, listening to them to see if they fit the sound I was going for. I also added a lot of Spotify's suggested songs. Some of these songs fit, many others didn't. I finally settled on the tracks that I wanted, cutting some of the songs for time. I wanted this mix to fit on a 90-minute cassette tape, which is just slightly over 45 minutes per side (there is some wiggle room on each side of the tape; the length usually depends on the manufacturer). That was the easy part.

The hardest part was determining the order of the songs. Other than knowing I wanted to lead with Nancy Sinatra, I had no idea how to order everything. I figured the only way to do it was to listen to the playlist in shuffle mode and move things around as they played. That seemed to work pretty well and I got some good combinations out of it. I was able to go a little further and strung together at least one "mini set" that revolved around variations of "sun" or "heat". As a bonus many of these songs flowed together rather well.

I wanted to record as many songs from physical media sources as possible, but the only two songs I had were "Bang Bang" (on the Kill Bill Vol. 1 soundtrack CD) and "Wicked Games" (from Isaak's album Heart Shaped World). The rest I had to record from Spotify. I think it worked out alright; I used Excel to split up the tracks into Side A and Side B, which worked perfectly for Side A...but not so much for Side B. I ended up with several minutes of blank tape at the end. Still to be determined, I plan to add a "bonus" track to the end that's not part of the final track list.

Overall I had a great time putting this together but the most fun was creating a J-Card for the cassette case as well as a printed label for the cassette itself. For this I used Canva to create the J-Card cover; I used the base imagery to then create the track listing for the inside of the J-Card and the labels for the cassette. I used templates provided by duplication.com: Analogue Media Tech. I printed the J-Card on a piece of photo paper and the labels onto regular Avery mailing labels and cut everything to fit. The end result is something I'm immensely proud of, and am waiting only for that final bonus track inspiration to hit me before I pop out the tabs to make this a permanent cassette.

Cover art for the Dreamy Sounds mixtape. It features whispy clouds on a dark sky.