In the fall of 1991 I found myself working through a semester of graduate school in Dekalb, IL on an Assistantship program that paid me all of $400 a month. As the Christmas holiday drew near I needed to come up with a low cost solution for gifts to give to family & friends. I had just recently been given two rather generous gift certificates for a music store in town, and already having a somewhat extensive CD collection, set about making a mix tape to give to my friends.
But I couldn’t just do a tape of songs. No, I wanted to do a mix that had no gaps between songs, where each piece of music blended smoothly into the next for a non-stop listening experience. I made a list of songs I wanted to use (always striving for music that is rarely or never heard on the radio), made notes as to how they started and ended, and then proceeded to press record on a 100 minute cassette and crossfade the songs from two CD players live on to the tape without pause for each of the two 50 minute sides.
That first mix was Move Your Mind, and I was incredibly lucky with how well it came out considering what I had to work with. Since then my creation method has evolved through using multitrack record decks, burning to CD instead of cassette, doing the entire process on the computer, delivering the mix via USB drive, and now as of 2025 just doing a digital delivery. But what hasn’t changed is my concept of making a seamless music experience from songs and artists that are rarely heard on mainstream radio.
I don’t expect everyone (or anyone) to like everything in my mixes, but hope that everyone discovers at least one new artist they may not have heard before, and I encourage them to purchase more music from that artist.
✧ ✧ MidWestMyers ✧ ✧ 