Nightmare!Įven worse, what if the key detection is out but gives you a key that is totally incompatible, even as an Energy Boost? It’s gonna throw your carefully crafted mix right off track. What’s worse, your next track is actually in 4A – so you perform another Energy Boost straight after the first one! And all the while you thought you were mixing solely in 4A/5A. It’s uncomfortable.Īnd, of course, by accidentally performaing an Energy Boost when you thought you were mixing in key, you’ve thrown the whole vibe of your mix off course. The mix will feel like it’s jarring with the listener. If you do more than maybe one or two Energy Boosts an hour, you’re highly likely to confuse and disrupt your audience. The problem with performing an Energy Boost Mix is that they are really noticeable – as such you want to use them sparingly. It’s just like a key change in songs… the bits where the songwriter really wants you to pay attention! It’s called an ‘Energy Boost’ mix, and is useful for when you want to make a powerful new statement or grab everyone’s attention. Jumping 2 Steps up the Camelot Wheel is an Advanced Harmonic Mixing Technique. Only disaster – the algorithm was wrong… you thought the next track was 4A (F Minor), but it’s actually in 6A (G Minor). But, then, you use a track your key detection tells you is 4A. You’re mixing 4A into 4A, 5A, and bac into 4A – a perfectly ‘in-key’ route around the Camelot Wheel. Your results tell you that the tracks you want to play are compatible. Let’s say you’re using an inferior key detection algorithm, such as one in your DJ software. Hopefully it’s becoming clear why the most accurate key detection is important if you want to mix harmonically. That’s 2 steps, and likely to result in a key clash. But 8A is a key clash with 9B, because you need to make two steps to reach them. For example, 8A will go with 8B, because that’s one step. Furthermore, a single step between A and B is compatible, but only if the total number of steps is stil one. Similarly, numbers sequentially up or down will also be compatible. Tracks with the same key are perfect key matches, so 8A will always go with 8A. The reason for this is to enable you to quickly establish which keys will go together. The numbers relate to the root note of each key. Minor keys are repsented by an ‘A’ while Major keys are coded ‘B’. Here’s what it looks like:Īs you can see, each musical key has it’s own code: 8A = C Minor, for example. You don’t need to remember whether C Minor is compatible with G Flat, B Minor or E Flat… the Camelot Wheel makes it super easy. This code enables you to visualise how compatible tracks are. It’s the alpha-numeric system by which musical keys are given a special code. You may already be familiar with the Camelot Wheel. You could possibly even imagine that they are the same song! The Camelot Wheel of Fortune… They will probably share many of the same notes and chirds. Knowing that a song is rooted in C Minor tells us that songs also in C Minor are likely to sound as if they ‘belong’ together. When we apply that to DJing, instead of concerning ourselves with the chords and notes present in the song itself, we’re more interested in the overal root key of the song. If a song is in C Minor, for example, it will mostly contain notes or chords from the scale of C Minor. So in the same way that songs tend to be in one ‘key’ (or sometimes two), DJs that use harmonic mixing like to keep their DJ sets ‘in-key’. Well, firstly, it’s about applyng music theory to DJing. We’ve established that harmonic mixing is the process of mixing tracks together that ‘go’. Poor key detection means you’re more likely to perform amateur mixes. Key detection is vital to harmonic mixing, because it tells you exactly which tracks will be harmonically compatible, and which won’t. On the flipside, mix tracks together that ‘key-clash’, and it will probably sound amateur. Mix tracks that go together musically, and your mix will sound beautiful. Harmonic mixing is essentially the process of mixing tracks together which have ‘key consonance’ – in other words, tracks that have compatible root keys. Since we invented the term over 15 years ago, harmonic mixing has become a core principle for most professional DJs.
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