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The ten-year-old boy inside of me was thrilled when iTunes incorporated easy, painless CD burning functions to its wonderfully clean UI a few years ago. I'm sure the ten-year-old boy inside of me couldn't have waited to get his hands on the latest iTunes update just so he could experiment with various eclectic combinations of music to try and find a way of arranging other people's tunes in a way that could create a surround-sound experience that was uniquely his.

Actually, it was more likely that he was probably just stoked at having technology at his fingertips that would allow him to create hilarious mixes of assorted MP3s consisting mostly of Adam Sandler comedy sketches and drug-related home-brew parodies of Sesame Street songs. Maybe in a few years he'd be trying to piece together insipid teeny-bopper tracks to find just the right combination that would get that cute girl in his third period PE class to fall madly in love with him. Thanks to iTunes, you too can relive the magic of making awkward mix CDs, and perhaps, in a moment of genius, realize why the horrid combination of Backstreet Boys and Usher failed to attract any nubile young ladies in high school.

The actual steps of making a mix CD in iTunes are pretty easy to explain. Create a new playlist in iTunes (Command - N or just choose it in the File menu), locate whatever songs you want to put on the CD in your library and drag them over to your playlist, and arrange them in whatever order you desire. From there, insert a blank CD, click Burn Disc over in the upper right corner, and BAM - your own mix is on the burn. If inspiration hits while you're elsewhere, you can even design your own mix CD using the On-The-Go playlist function on your iPod, save it there, and burn it when you get back. But you could have figured that out by yourself - what you want to know is how to make a good mix CD.

The Check-This-Stuff-Out Mix

The Check-This-Stuff-Out CD is the most basic kind of mix CD. As such, it is used by budding artists looking to get their tracks some air time in clubs (which is not you), everyday music junkies trying to convince someone of their amazing taste in music in order to win more indie cred with them (which is probably you), and, sometimes, actual appreciators of the art who are genuinely seeking to expand a friend's musical horizons.

The key to making a good Check-This-Stuff-Out CD is to pick out tracks of the artists or genres that you're trying to expose the victim to which aren't all radically different from whatever they're used to. If I were to give a general contemporary rock-music friend of mine a CD full of Westside Connection, they would most likely listen to Ice Cube rap about killing cops for all of ten seconds and then throw it at me. That is not a successful Check-This-Stuff-Out CD. Since the goal is not to find a CD that you really like (even if it's just 80 minutes of rapping about drugs and guns and prostitutes), but a CD that will move your friend closer to what you like. Think of your musical tastes as opposed to yours along a continuum, and pick songs that begin closer to your friend's side, to get them listening to the CD in those first critical tracks when their attention is fully occupied with the music, and gradually progress down the spectrum towards your musical tastes. To return to the above spectrum, the Check-This-Stuff-Out CD focused on bringing someone to a closer appreciation of rap could probably begin with something old-school (say, the infamous "Walk this Way" by Aerosmith and Run D.M.C.) or, if their tastes are a bit more current, a track or two from the relatively recent Linkin Park/Jay Z collaboration album. From there you can feel safe to move further down the continuum. Just be gentle.

The Driving Mix

The Driving Mix CD is another classic mix CD staple, though the arrangement of an effective Driving Mix CD varies heavily based upon the age and gender of the car's passengers. The archetypical Driving Mix is prevalent among males in their high-school years to their mid-twenties - essentially, the ages in which we're most likely to be driving around in cars with several other people rather than taking care of family business or what-have-you in our own car by ourselves. While the goals of this kind Driving Mix CD have goals in common with Driving Mixes for other audiences - like making sure the driver and passengers are all awake and alert (no ballads, slow songs, or emo!) - the overriding goal of the young man's Driving Mix CD is to make the car's passengers feel incredibly bad-ass, and in some extreme cases - dare I say it - gangsta. In order to make a mix CD that excites your testosterone, you need to pick bass-heavy tracks that show off your sound system. Determining the tracks appropriate to a Driving Mix CD is largely a process of trial and error. It's not an art - just throw track after track of crew anthems, party tracks, and anything else that can get your chest thumping. The general rule of thumb is: if the song playing in your car could conceivably lower property values of wherever you happen to be driving around, it's a keeper.

This is not the only way to approach a Driving Mix CD, though. Since a central goal of the mix is to keep the car's inhabitants alert and exciting, songs that people can easily sing along are good choices for a mixed-company drive. Popular '80s tracks ("Bizarre Love Triangle"), oldies ("Build Me Up Buttercup"), and early-to-mid '90s one-hit-wonder songs ("Tubthumping," "Breakfast at Tiffany's") work nicely. Like the gangsta driving mix, there does not have to be any rhyme, reason, or general concern for order on this CD; a perfect example of a Driving Mix CD track shows up in Wayne's World - that's right, Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody." This cinematic moment is precisely what you should be aiming for.

The Party Mix

The Party Mix is another CD archetype that centers heavily around young people, generally in the high school to college range. All pretenses of artistic expression and broadened horizons are off; if you are not a professional DJ, save the experimentation for a later date. While music is crucial for a decent college party, it is much easier to make a bad party mix CD than a good party mix CD, so stick to the basics. Locate all the dumb radio tracks that have been played at parties you've been to before - Lil' Jon is perfect for this - and stick to those. The most adventurous you're allowed to be is experimenting with older party tracks, and keep those to a minimum.

For those Party Mix first-timers, understand this; people do not, as a rule, go to the average high school/college party for the music. Gasp! More often than not, people will go to parties to meet new people, visit old friends, rub up against attractive members of their preferred sex, and maybe knock back a few drinks. The presence of music is crucial to these goals, but the appreciation of the music itself doesn't really contribute to any of them, so save all the tracks you think will adequately impress upon your partygoers that you have impeccable musical taste; save those for the Check-This-Stuff-Out mix. The last thing you want in your party is for the dance floor to stop, so keep up their momentum by throwing generally high-energy tracks with simple beats and lyrics that don't make people stop and think. You don't want to interrupt the flow of a good party, and throwing a track in there that people neither recognize nor can dance to is a good way to do that. Also, whenever possible, try and find songs that have similar beats (particularly the bass lines) so that people can make smooth transitions between songs.

The Forget-Me-Not Mix

This is my personal favorite of the mix CDs. Unlike the other CDs, which all have ulterior motives besides just listening to good music, the Forget-Me-Not Mix simply tries to have the listener remember (hopefully fondly) the good times. Forget-Me-Not Mixes can be made about general time periods, individuals, classes, groups, or any other kind of shared experiences. The simplicity of the goal allows you to employ much more refined music sensibilities, it also forces you to be more conscious of the track selection and order.

The easiest Forget-Me-Not Mixes are composed mostly of songs that have some kind of relevance to the people they're intended to and the experience they're meant to evoke. Start by finding a list of songs that you might have actually listened to with most of these people, or referred to, or otherwise explicitly mentioned. These songs are the easiest way to help people remember the good times. My current college roommate, for example, picks out singles for his MP3 playlist and updates it roughly once a month, meaning that for any given semester I and my roommates already have a good 15 songs or so burned into our minds just from hearing him play the same music day in and day out. Unsurprisingly, many of these tracks find their ways on to the mixes I make for those semesters. While it may be annoying to you to put these tracks on now, listen to the CD again later down the line and it will most likely evoke more memories than just irritation at hearing the same song for the 5000th time. After that, try and pick tracks that would have some kind of reference to particular conversations, moments, events or in-jokes, either in their song title or lyrics.

When you're ordering the tracks on a Forget-Me-Not Mix, you will want to pick a relatively upbeat track to start the CD off - something feel-good and ideally still relevant to whatever it is you want remembered. This is the easiest way to hook someone into listening to your whole CD. Alternatively, if you have a mic, your first track can actually be a recording of your own voice giving shoutouts or doing whatever it is you want to do to introduce the CD, and then have the upbeat track come immediately afterwards. One of my favorite Mix Tricksš I ever pulled on my friends was to use comedian Dave Chappelle's intro to Talib Kweli's "Beautiful Mixtape," where he exclaims in his best Rick James voice, "This is one of the baddest, funkiest mixtapes EVAH!". Stuff like that can really draw in the listener in a way that starting with a song doesn't.

After the intro, you're perfectly free to order tracks however you like. Don't jerk the listener around too much from one track to the next; identify a mood for each track and try and group similar tracks together - if possible, in an order that mirrors the ups and downs of the CD's subject matter. Once you reach the last track, try and pick a song that appropriately communicates a relaxed, laid back mood of ending and closure; the textbook example is Green Day's Time of Your Life, which, for a certain generation, was the default choice in any kind of end-of-the-year slideshow for a good five years at least. Other easy picks for ending tracks are songs that roll during movie credits; even if your friends haven't seen the movie in question, it was usually chosen as the ending theme for a movie precisely because it retains exactly the kind of mood you want to have for your last track. Consider this a suggestion rather than a rule; some songs, like Smash Mouth's Why Can't We Be Friends cover, manage to achieve this mood without being laid back at all. Finally, if you have any joke tracks, throw it on after the last track as a pleasant surprise for the listener. Putting it any earlier can ruin the mood.

The Robert Mah Rule

All of the above suggestions for common mix tapes are precisely that: suggestions. Learn the conventions of the mix tape you're trying to make and then you can feel more comfortable in breaking them whenever necessary. However, the Robert Mah Rule of Mix CDs is inviolable. This rule is named for an unfortunate friend of mine who, the stories have it, created a Driving Mix CD that was so pathetically distasteful to us that we subjected it to a simple test: three strikes and it's out. It was out by track four, I believe, and the contents of the rest of the CD are known only to its creator and perhaps an unlucky hitchhiker along the California I-5. The lessons of the Robert Mah Rule are simple:

1. For the love of Pete, don't put wussy emo music on a Driving Mix CD.
2. Much less three wussy emo songs in a row.
3. Especially not when you're the only person in the all-male van that listens to it.

Essentially, the Robert Mah Rule boils down to this: Don't put music on your Mix that people will hate. If you must, keep it under three songs.

Now go forth and Mix!

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