Rohdesign | Designer Mike Rohde : Rediscovering My 1980s Mixtapes

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November 19, 2009

Rediscovering My 1980s Mixtapes

This morning with a tweet from Luke Dorny I was reminded of the many mixtapes I created in the mid-1980s and early 1990s.

Many of my friends from Milwaukee moved away to college, so I created mixtapes of new wave music for them to listen to on cassette tapes. That's right, cassette tapes.

Making the Mix

I would spend hours listening to Milwaukee's 91.7 FM WMSE, our local college radio station, capturing great music on my cassette deck.

There were no downloads, Pandora, LastFM, iTunes or Amazon MP3 available for creating music mixes. It was a matter of hours of listening, the luck of catching a great tune and plenty of re-taping.

Typically, I would create a master tape on a high quality cassette, making copies for friends from the master.

Of course, being a designer, I would always create a tape cover to complete the package, which was as much fun as capturing and building the music on the tape.

I've been slowly converting my old tapes to MP3s and thought it would be fun to share them. I hope you enjoy these two flashback mixtapes from the mid-eighties!