A new feature on The Squire Presents website are playlists (or mix CDs) that I will be listing from now on. This is because I am old enough to remember slaving over a Hi-Fi system creating mixtapes to play on my ever-present Walkman. When tape went by the wayside, there was the MiniDisc, which I used for a couple of years, but these never really took off in the same way tapes had. The best feature of the MiniDisc though was the ability to move songs without having to re-record them, or delete a song from the playlist if the flow didn’t sound quite right. The sound quality of the MiniDisc might not have been the best, but when played through Walkman Headphones, the tunes sounded pretty good to me.
Then I got hold of a PC with a CD burner. Having a computer to create playlists offered a great deal of freedom. This freedom included the ability to move songs around the playlist, edit songs, fade songs into one another and even create my own artwork. CDs might be seen as a bit old hat (even though in 2020, they seem to still be the most popular format for buying physical music), I still like to put together a playlist of songs, be it various or single artists, to the length of a CD. Therefore, I will be presenting these playlists including, where appropriate, the specific version of the song that was used as well as any further information I thought you may find interesting. For the most part, I also look to fill the entire CD (max length is about 1 hour, 19 minutes and 40 seconds), but sometimes the mix sounds right at a shorter playing time. Most probably there wasn’t enough material from an artist to fill an entire CD that sounded good to me. These are personal mixes where the songs flow is as important as the songs included. I have also tried not to use the same song (or at least the same version) on more than one compilation (in the same way I tried not to double up on the podcasts), but sometimes, it happens. I will be posting the first of these in the next few days. Enjoy.