Ever heard those albums where one track melds into the next, and the next, and the next, seamlessly transitioning from song to song for the whole album? It’s like the old style mix tape. It’s not hard to make one in your DAW. Here’s how…
I use FL Studio, but it should work in any DAW. My examples will be FL Studio ones, so some translation to the other DAWs out there will be required on your part if you don’t use FL Studio.
Steps to Making a Continuous Mix
Here are the steps I do to make a continuous mix:
1. Make your tracks individually. This means producing them like you would standalone tracks – fully mastered and everything. Save them as WAV files (or whatever other lossless type you prefer).
2. Make a new DAW project and import all of your tracks for the album into it as WAV files.
3. Line all of the tracks up back to back like you want them to appear in order in the album. If they have transitions where they are slowly increasing in volume or slowly decreasing at the ends, then overlap them a bit to not have that (except for the first one and the last one).
4. Crossfade each track into the next (see the image below with that area circled). If you have the settings correct, FL Studio does this automatically.
4. If you want to have your last track loop back to your first, then take the tail portion of your last one and fade it into your first track’s start.
8. Export the whole album as a continuous mix track. This will probably be long like 45 minutes or something like that.
12. Make it a “Bandcamp Exclusive” or something similar to draw listeners to the platform and give them a great bonus and excellent experience of your music.
What I Like in a Continuous Mix
I like to have each track with a bit of the beginning transition and ending transitions into and out of the previous and next tracks. Why? Because when listened to separately by a listener, they may say to themselves “Hmm, I wonder what the track before this one was – it sounds kind of cool what little I heard of it at the intro,” and that makes them listen to more of my music.
I also sometimes like to have the first track have a little bit of the transition from the last track because, if this is a “front-to-back” looping mix, the listener can put the track on, and it will play over and over again, seamlessly.
Below are some use cases.
Whole Album Continuous Mix
My Northern Static album is one where I wanted to have a continuous mix so the album can play start to finish for the listener with no stopping and some nice transitions you can’t get from platforms like Spotify. So, on Bandcamp, I have all the tracks individually like they would be on Spotify or other streaming platforms, but I also have a continuous mix version of the entire album only available on Bandcamp.
Whole Album Looping Mix
Continuous looping versions of whole albums, if made with good transitions, can create unique content for your next release. Making these tracks available only on certain platforms or materially can draw listeners in and provide you with unique selling points.
Taking the last part of the last song on an album and putting it at the front before the first song is a way to get that “front to back” whole album loop. I also like to take the first part of the first song and put a bit of it at the end of the album. This really gets the loop effect going for the whole album.
While this may not appeal to everyone, for some it can be a nice way to put an album on repeat and not feel like it ever ends or ever starts over again. All of the tracks just glide into the next including the ones from back to front.
I could see this useful as an album of nature sounds, sleep tracks, or even background music (think grocery store music playing in a loop while people shop).
Album Preview
I also made a shortened version of my entire album so listeners could get a preview on Instagram. For this I used the same technique as above, but I just cut slices of short durations out of the middle (or the good points) of each track on the album and transitioned them all together for a short preview of every track. See below how it looked in my DAW where you can see about ten tracks back to back transitioning (cross fading) into each other.
I then put this on Instagram to promote my album and it looked like this below.
Single Tracks
You could also make seamlessly cross fading single tracks that can be played in a loop. Now this would work on most streaming platforms like Spotify because they have that option, but by taking the back end of a track and putting it at the start of the track for a few seconds and essentially making a loop out of a single track, you can have something that is seamless. Listeners may like this type of track so it can be put on repeat as background music for exhibits, or for sleeping. I think there’s a lot of potential in this.
Other Uses
I think the idea of continous looping and full album seamless transitions are something that can be appealing to a wide variety of people. It, in my opinion, is worth exploring further.