The late comic Mitch Hedberg said, "You have to start strong, and you have to
finish strong. Those are the tricks, right? You can't be like pancakes – all
exciting at first, but by the end, you're sick of 'em." Hedberg was talking
about the art of standup comedy, but the same principle applies to making a good
music mix. You want the opening and closing songs to be strong, as those leave
the first and last impression.
Trish Doller, a disc jockey in Sandusky, Ohio, applies this principle in
making her own mixes. "I like to start with something that sets the tone and end
up with the something that feels like an ending song," Doller said. "I don't
like my mix tape to feel like it's open-ended, like there could have been more,
but I ran out of time."
Andrew C. Merriman, creator of the web comic Gordon Universe, reviews all
manner of pop culture as it strikes his fancy. He and several friends started
the game of each picking an equal number of songs to mix on one CD to listen to
on car trips. "I usually start with something that's got a quiet start, but is
an awesome song," he said. "Or something that starts with one instrument like
'Shaft', or 'Papa Was a Rolling Stone' or 'Locomotive Breath'."
Spoken word introductions to songs, such as those Parliament-Funkadelic is
prone to opening its albums with, are also good for first track songs, he said,
but you don't want them in the middle of the mix. As for endings, Merriman's
philosophy is simple. "You gotta end with the big guns," he said, although, he
added, you might add a tag song after the epic finale, as sort of an epilogue
following your climax. The epilogue song is generally short and sweet and
sometimes silly. On one disc, he wrapped up the entire package with a one-minute
live version of the theme from "Super Mario Brothers 2."
Steve Mullett has made more than 400 mix tapes and about 150 mix CDs. He has
no official music-knowledge pedigree, but he has lots of practice and he knows
his stuff. If one of Mullett's big closer songs is particularly long, he said he
will also sometimes add a short song, about two minutes or less, as sort of a
bonus track. When working with a cassette, Mullett will work with side B first.
"I will say that I generally try to have the best songs at the beginning of side
A and end of Side B, starting with a peppy song or two. The filler, to the
extent that there is filler on a mix tape, goes on the end of side A and on side
B, I start building toward the fantastic finish, which is more often than not an
epic-type song," he said. "I generally make side B first because it's hard to
gauge exactly how many of the songs I have planned for the tape that I'm going
to get onto side B, and I want to have the best songs available to finish up
that side," Mullett added. That way, when I'm finishing up side A, I can throw
any old thing on there and it's fine, because it's only the end of side A."