At the beginning of the summer, Dana commissioned me to make a lullaby mix CD for the coming young’un. Three months later, I’m finally getting them burned. Why’d it take so long?
Well, I’m lazy. But I’m also methodical, and what follows is the first part in a series of tutorials on how I took all summer to make an awesome mix CD.
Gather the Wheat and Chaff
I like to start by gathering way more songs than can fit on the final mix. I started with a quick search on ask.metafilter.com since this is exactly the sort of thing that gets brainstormed on MeFi. And, lo and behold, there were several posts tagged with “lullaby” and one post that had exactly what I wanted:
I’d like to make a lullaby mix CD for my hipster niece/nephew-to-be. Suggestions? I’m looking more for quiet, peaceful songs by “regular” artists, rather than straight-up kids songs. Think more acoustic renderings of rock/pop, less Yanni.
I did a quick skim of the article and copied down songs that looked promising.
I knew I wanted some classical music as well and didn’t trust my spotty knowledge of classical music to help me, so I also browsed some commercial classical lullaby collections on Amazon.com to get some ideas of appropriate selections to include.
Armed with my list, I then head to MediaMonkey. MediaMonkey is a music organization software; I use the robust free version which is fine for my purposes. I’ve been using it for some time, and have all my music organized by it in one searchable database. I can quickly see if I have any of these songs already; any ones I’m missing I can decide to buy through iTunes or eMusic.
I also used the occasion to do some searches based on keywords such as “lullaby,” “sleep,” “night,” “baby,” etc. Anything that looked that promising, I copied onto a folder dedicated to this lullaby mix.
Of course, I also included any songs that simply occurred to me as good candidates for the mix. I wanted, for instance, to include the Beatles’ “Blackbird” since I vividly remember it being used in a delivery room scene on ER (directed by Quentin Tarantino).
Set Some Ground Rules
Now that I had some idea of what I had available to me, I started setting some ground rules for myself. This is important to expedite the filtering through of the songs I had gathered, and to give me an idea of the structure I want to adhere to. I’ve made mixes by choosing one song and then the next song and then the next song until I was out of space, but I generally prefer to have some overall theme or idea that ties the collection together.
Dana said that she wanted a variety of different genres: soft rock, classical, jazz. I’m pretty proud of my eclectic tastes, and I generally like my mixes to represent the breadth of that eclecticism, so I was more than happy to oblige. One problem though: I was hard pressed to find any rap/hip-hop that seemed appropriate. God knows I looked, too. Okay, so hip-hop is out, but the final mix is going to have to have a little of everything else.
I figured the point of the CD was to draw down an energetic fussy cranky little baby down to a calmly sleeping one. Seemed pretty obvious that the songs ought to be sequenced from high energy and volume to low energy and volume. And I didn’t want to start too high energy — Gwar was out.
This being my impressionable future son, I also wanted to nix out any foul language or immoral messages. In sorting through my database, I was reminded that I had Johnny Cash’s haunting My Mother’s Hymn Book, and I knew I wanted to have some hymns and worship songs in there.
Which brought me to my last rule: the songs had to be good to sing. I wanted to be able to sing my son to sleep, and I wanted him to remember these songs as he grew up. A lullaby mix is no joke.
Tomorrow: Part 2 – How to pare all this down
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