Holidays Chillout
Cozy tunes for the chilly weather outside!
Summary
Holidays Chillout is a Lo-Fi Hip Hop music mix created for the winter season and inspired by the plethora of seasonal music mixes that became prominent on YouTube throughout the latter half of the 2010s. The music mix features several times of day as the playlist progresses that goes from morning to night with their own blended environmental scenes featuring snowfall. This music mix stands as the first proper mix ever produced within my project library and was the source of many breakthroughs in my understanding of music and audio. There is only one component in this project which can be viewed here since it is a self contained Nehrpsyznet exclusive with Arcmaevotix having no sibling items to it. This is because any related creations which were hosted on Arcmaevotix (formerly the old AmzroSevca channel) have been direclty ported into this production.
Process
Development of the project kicked off with some rudimentary R&D as I looked at the current trends online of how seasonal music mixes were being made and presented. While I had listened to plenty of Lo-Fi Hip Hop mixes over the years (thanks in large part to Chillhop arriving in the 2010s), I never had the idea to make one myself since I always considered a majority of the productions by Chillhop clones or music re-upload channels to be low effort. That all changed when I came across Fantastic Music several years after Chillhop had launched. After listening to some of their earliest mixes and seeing that it was indeed a music mix and not just audio files stacked back to back, I became inspired to try my hand at a Lo-Fi Hip Hop mix. While I was already enamored with music mixing and music composition thanks to my obsession with Old School EDM channels, I never really thought that a Lo-Fi Hip Hop mix could sound so smoothly sequenced. This is when I began to complete re-educate myself on the fundamentals of music mixing and learning techniques that would make for a seamless mix. After months of finding tracks, trying to figure out how to string them together, and creating visuals to go along with the sonic journey, I finally had assembled one of the longest mixes I have ever made to date. At around this time on YouTube, many individuals would just take a 30 minute playlist of unmixed audio and then loop in several times over to make a multi-hour long “mix” that got stale after the one hour mark. I was determined to break this and wanted to build a true two hour long mix of Lo-Fi Hip Hop beats that fit the vibes of the holiday season.
Reflection
Holidays Chillout was a lot of fun to create since it allowed me to not only discover new artists but it taught me a lot when it came to the process of music mixing and how many different techniques you can pull on depending on the elements and attributes of the songs that you are threading together. No matter how difficult it may be, there is always a way to mix two pieces of audio together in a way that doesn’t sound too unnatural. All of the music mixes that I had developed prior to this project suffered from amateur mixing production that lead to abrupt stops, sudden jumps, or discordant tones. After the production of Holidays Chillout I had far clearer vision as to what needed to be changed or fixed with my past music mixing projects and newfound knowledge that I picked up came in incredibly handy in the revising of those older creations. This was also one of the first projects where I started exploring motion graphics, visual storytelling, and animation more in my work.