Advanced Key Mixing Techniques for DJs

So I just got finished recording a 1.25 hr mix using basic key mixing, and performed 2 of the advanced techniques by accident (went and checked after recording).

If anyones up for critiquing this its a great mix that constantly builds energy by going up in BPMs and Energetic Genres (vast majority are house genres)

A lot of you have more musical experience than me but this is pretty much as far as someone with little music theory can go in terms of harmonic mixing.

Thanks for your time. Great article as always!

https://www.mixcloud.com/djstereoscopic/2015-the-journey-live-mix-variety-mostly-house-dj-stereoscopic/

Yeah it’s all great but what to do when your tempo changes? Your key changes as well. How to deal with that? Keeping in mind original key, than changing it to new key? How would you know how you key has changed based on BPM change? I don’t use key lock by the way. It would be great if Traktor could estimate new kay based on bpm change.

works well see for your self http://youtu.be/K2k5PfOl5Vs

All this discussion and no mention of tonality or modes, which explains why an absolute major transition will only work some of the time. In the above video, it doesn’t work. You can hear the dissonance on the lower beep sound. However, interestingly, you then mix into a song which is 9A and it works flawlessly, yet you don’t explain how you can bump up 5 numbers. In fact, a jump from Fm to Em only has two notes in common so the jump has such a large space for error, it would be insane to suggest to anyone to try it just using the MIK or Open Key system since that approach is a highly simplified “on the fly” kind of approach.

That being said, this article is definitely a step in the right direction, showing that harmonic mixing is more than just +/- 1 and changing a letter. More music theory postz please 🙂

(Which would also be really good for the producers who frequent this site. Also, check this video of Chilly Gonzales talking about his work on Daft Punk’s RAM, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc3I0Ent9Zg

he mentions briefly about figuring out chords to connect two keys. Imagine having an F1 full of bridging loops! It would be a thing of beauty.)

nobody noticed the midifighter twister, that’s a shame…

One thing that I like to do is jump up one semitone, but it’s tricky. You can’t mix the second tune in with the first one, but what you can do is jump the first track up by one semitone right as you launch the second track.. I call it the Bon Jovi “Living on a Prayer” effect because that is the easiest example I can think of (the part where the key changes for the second part of the chorus) I don’t think they use one semitone in that song and you don’t have to go by 1 but the point is that you are changing keys with the second tune by matching the first one to it instead of vice versa.

Same key, just switching major to minor… Odds are that you’ll find harsh dissonance often. For the rest of the cases just increase a fifth… Or decrease it… +7 semitones or -5 semitones… It makes absolute sense for straight ordered transitioning in music sections with equal polarities but there is no way to find out how many steps there are between the unisons… But odds are that it doesn’t matter what you do, you’ll eventually find harsh unsolvable dissonance every now and then too… like mixing 2 music loops in the same key with an incompatible order, as Ean mentioned… sometimes loop lengths are incompatible too… So then again, you have nothing. It’s a good guide to finding the right way to harmonic mixing but without education it’s still not reliable. Those who get it get it, those who don’t just won’t.

If only there was a blog about DJ appreciation etiquette or in scene rules for people who complain about overconfident DJs that wanna make their superman harmonic mixing technique live…. *sigh* sometimes they mess up, that is okay too…

PD: Assuming that people don’t know tolerance it’s proper to classically transition drums with drums or avoid mixing notes with more notes…(which I recommend even if you are an experienced sober DJ) you don’t need to produce something new, the producer already broke his head filtering and EQing a big bunch of sounds so that any DJ just limits it up mixing 2 tracks with an EQ 3 and a cross fader… I’m sure the producer will feel respected if you don’t eff it up lol.

Another issue with this article is that Mixed In Key isn’t 100% accurate. Check with a piano, with the artist, and the label’s key suggestion BEFORE relying solely on MIK. MIK will often detect a track as a relative key to what key the track is actually in, and blindly mixing like this can get you into a lot of trouble.

I posted on the YouTube channel but I thought it’d be useful here too:

I thought the instruction was perfectly clear, it’s just misguided.

I expected the video to be about relative minor and major keys, which is a really useful tool to have in your box. The mix didn’t sound like a true transition from major to relative minor, so I checked how Mixed In Key works. I had to do this because I have absolute pitch so I mix everything by ear, thus I’ve never had to rely on the MIK system.

The other comments are right – Mixed In Key uses a Camelot Wheel where the relative minor of 7B (F major) is 7A (D minor). Mixing 7B with 4A goes from F major to F minor, which might work and might not. It’s certainly not something I’d try as a first option.

I think the error is a bit confusing in the context of the video for a number of reasons:

1.Without having heard the whole song, I’d say that the first sounds more like C major, as the chords are a C and then an F major chord. I could be wrong though, but in the context of the loop used it’s more like C major.

2. The second loop may well be from a song in F minor (again, I don’t know it so I’m basing my judgement on the loop used). It only has one note, an F, so it could be in F major or F minor. It would also work fine with D minor or even as the fifth of B flat minor or major, and could actually form the major third of C# major. So the loop can’t really be said to be in F minor, it’s neither major or minor because a single note never constitutes a key or chord (which makes loops like this super-useful for mixing with a multitude of keys).

So the reason the mix of the first two loops sounds OK is that the solitary F note from loop 2 goes OK with the F chord in loop 1, though to me it jars a bit with the C chord in loop 1. In essence, Ean gets away with the error in this example but I wouldn’t advise it as a general approach.

To clarify, the error in the video isn’t about mixing from 7B to 4A, it’s about over-relying on what your program tells you about keys, THEN using that information to go from 7B to 4A.

3. Lastly, Ean mixes from loop 2, in F minor, to a tune in E minor. That really jars and a general approach of ‘most minor tunes will mix well with other minor tunes’ is not good advice in my view. I understood that was what the video was getting at towards the end. Mixing any two tunes or loops that are a semitone apart will always jar, so unless that’s deliberate (say, some minimal bleepy stuff like Sleeparchive) it’s a no-go, particularly when your DJ software will let you nudge one tune up or down by a semitone to lock the tunes in harmony and avoid dissonance.

The solution? It’s easy for me to say ‘don’t rely on your computer to tell you what key something is in’, so instead I’d advise something in the spirit of what the tutorial advises: mix your Mixed In Key numbers together like the system was made to do (e.g. 7B with 7A), but also trust your ears, practice and experiment.

In general, lots of the DJTT tutorials are useful so please keep up the good work folks!

Oh, and to give a good example of fully harmonic tunes from relative major and minor keys that mix well, try the beatless mix of Smokebelch II by Sabres of Paradise (super-major, in G major) into the original mix of On by Aphex Twin (very melodic but minor, E minor to be exact).

Um… Fmajor to Fminor sounds really strange. In fact, that is probably one of the worst ways to transition from major to minor. They are very harmonically different (3/7 notes). You are better off transitioning to the relative minor (7B to 7A) or going to a +1/-1 minor (7B to 6A/8A – no more than 1/7 notes different)

It is kind of frustrating to see someone with no musical knowledge claiming they can teach you about harmonic changes like this. I get that a lot of DJs make and play good music with no musical knowledge, but when someone with as much clout as Ean Golden tells the world something that is wrong (as if it is gospel) it bothers me.

If you don’t know what you are talking about, don’t pretend to know what you are talking about. I would respect DJTT and Ean Golden way more if they stuck to what they are experts at instead of pretending to know basic music theory and being wrong. There are much easier and more interesting ways of mixing in key that could be focused on.

It is a sad state this industry is in when the leaders are unwilling to admit their lack of knowledge in an area. They pretend to know what they are talking about and perpetuate the overwhelming ignorance and unwillingness to admit your faults in this industry.

You don’t have to know everything to be respected. You aren’t going to learn anything by teaching something that is incorrect.

I don’t know if anyone actually reads these comments, but if you are reading this, please don’t try to mix in key like this.

Thanks,
mRay