Music Prep

Had some spare time today and was in the mood for some music prep so I'll finish the last part of the research another day.

So what's music prep all about?

Well first off;  I've got about 220 songs and I can only fit about half of those if I want to keep the video a reasonable length. [Under 15mins preferred.]  So a lot of culling needs to be done.  Also I just need to become more familiar with the songs so I can figure out how they might mix together well.

Basically, I listen to all the songs!

But not exactly.  I don't listen all the way through 220 songs.  I just listen to the important parts.  You know, the catchy bit that everyone remembers. [usually the chorus right?]

At the same time I work out the beats per minute of each track with this handy web tool.  [Having the bpm's becomes invaluable at the mixing stage.]  After getting the gist of the song I rename the file with it's bpm at the front.  This effectively orders all the songs by their bpm's.


I also move songs that I want to cull into a rejects folder.  [I need to get better at not downloading so many songs in the first place,  but it's difficult to know at the beginning how many songs you're going to end up with.] 

A peak inside my Rejects folder

Getting rid of songs is hard, but it has to be done.  In this case I listened through the list and still had over 200 songs left.  So I had to go up and down the list and slowly decide what else could go.  It always helps to come up with some sort of loose rules to go by, so:
 
-An artist could only have one song in the mix or two songs max, but only if they were HUGE.

-Try to balance the number of songs across different genres.

-Songs should have been popular in more than one country.

-Get rid of my pet favorites if they don't deserve to be there.  :(

-If there's still too many, get rid of Aaron Carter.  :)

A peak inside the Keeps folder

 
Like I said, these were fairly loose rules and were broken here and there along the way, but I got there in the end.  My final song list is sitting at a much more manageable 117.  Hopefully I'll be able to squeeze that many in...

So, all prepared and ready for mixing!





Random observations:
What a year for music. Lots and lots of classic tunes came out. Should be a good mix! - There were so many boy bands this year: Boyzone, Backstreet Boys, Five, 98°, And Girl bands like Spice Girls and B-Witched.  So... Look forward to those clogging up the mix... or not,  depending on your preference. - I usually mix in the odd TV and video game theme songs too.  A couple of kids tv shows come to mind for this year.  "I wanna be the very best, Like no one ever was!....."

See you next blog post.