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Fine-tune your sets with some Harmonic Mixing: Part One Reported by Stu Cox / Submitted 01-04-09 19:02 Ooh, harmonic mixing, well lar-dee-dah. Despite big names like Armin, Ferry Corsten and even Pete Tong championing the technique, it's one of the biggest controversies in DJing. With as many critics as proponents, arguments about it (especially on this site) can get fairly heated, partly because it confuses the life out of most people. Over this two part special, Stu Cox tries to set the record straight, dispelling the myths that make some people hate it so, while delivering a clear and comprehensive guide to get you on your feet and mixing in key in no time at all. 1. What is It and Why Should I Care? Most DJs understand the idea of beatmatching: playing music at the same speed and in synchronicity in order to maintain a flow through a set, essentially turning a set into one combined piece of music. Why? So that people can dance easily. To make it easy on the feet. Harmonic mixing is essentially the tonal equivalent of this: i.e. playing music in the same key so that this flow is even smoother. Why? To make it easy on the ears. I say same key, it doesn't have to be the same, there are various options, but I'll come onto that later on. When beatmatching goes wrong (or isn't even attempted at all), the result is the infamous trainwreck: beats out of time and sounding horrible. The harmonic mixing equivalent of this is a clash: notes out of key and sounding horrible. These are both things you might want to avoid. So in a lot of ways, harmonic mixing can just be considered an extension of the ideas involved in beatmatching. But a lot of people think that, like viagra, it causes more problems than it solves, which I'll discuss in detail a bit later. 2. What Exactly is a Key? It would be really quite daft to try and match keys without having any idea of what a "key" actually is. Quite understandably, many DJs don't have a background in musical theory so this concept may be as alien to them as a bidet is to a tramp, although I expect the vast majority have at least heard the word batted about. In simple terms, the key of a piece of music is the musical scale around which the notes are based. This is probably a good time to throw in the obligatory picture of a piano keyboard: Notes as they appear on a piano. Note: For our purposes, Db (said "Dee-flat") is the same as C# ("Cee-sharp"), Eb is the same as D# and so on; I'll just stick to using the -flat versions from here on. The most 'simple' key, C major, consists of all of (and only) the white notes: C, D, E, F, G, A and B. So if a piece of music just uses those notes, then it could well be in C major. C minor is similar, but contains two black notes in place of two of the white notes: C, D, Eb, F, G, Ab and B. Minor keys have a more moody feel than major keys, which can often sound quite cheesy. There are all sorts of keys, for each key on the keyboard, both white and black, there is a major key (X major) and a minor key (X minor), as well as all sorts of others we can ignore for the purpose of harmonic mixing. In fact, you can almost (but not quite) ignore major scales, as the vast majority of dance music is in a minor key. So how does matching them help? Well, if you've got two tracks in C minor which you're mixing together, all of the notes in both tracks will fall along the same scale and thus sound in harmony - in the same way that mixing two tracks the same speed will make all of the beats fall at the same times - WOW! There are in fact several keys that will work with any given key, but these are discussed in more detail later - for now I'm just going to stick to mixing tracks in the same key. Another related term is a scale - this is simply the notes of the key in sequence, so the scale of C major is C, D, E, F, G, A, B, in that order. And one more bit of music lingo I'll throw in is the tonic (or root note) of the key, which is the first note of the scale and the note after which the scale is named. That is, C is the tonic of both C major and C minor, D is the tonic of D major and D minor and so on. 3. Finding the Key of a Track If we're going to try and mix two tracks that are in the same key, whether nosebleed-inducing banging German hard trance or I-go-clubbing-in-a-scarf-and-a-pair-of-aviators bleepy Latin minimal techno, we need to find out what key our records are in. There are various bits of software around which you can load an MP3 into and it'll have a decent guess at the key. None of them are accurate 100% of the time, but they're certainly good enough to get you started and a lot of big names swear by them. Here a couple of examples: Rapid Evolution Mixed In Key However, you may decide you want to work it out yourself, the idea behind this being that you could well be more reliable than the software. This tends to be the option for the more musically adept and does tend to require a bit of knowledge about the scale of each key. You'll need some sort of musical instrument (be it a piano, a guitar, a trombone or just a bit of software which will play notes when you press buttons - like Click MusicalKEYS) to play a few notes along while you're listening to the track. A trombone. While not the traditional choice for keying up records, it has been done. Probably. Essentially, the best way to work out the key is just to pick a note, play it a few times, then let your ears guide you up or down until you find a note which sounds 'right' (strikes a chord with you, if you mind the pun - or gives you a warm fuzzy feeling inside). I apologise for the very vague description here, but it's hard to really define it any better than that. Once you get this, the chances are it's the tonic of the key, so if you find yourself strumming a C, with any luck the track's either in C major or C minor and we just have to work out which one. Luckily, a lot of dance music follows certain patterns that give a few extra clues. The main one of these is that if the track starts with a bassline which pretty much stays on one note, the vast majority of the time that note will be the tonic. Also, the first note the bassline plays in a phrase (of usually 8 or 16 bars) is, more often than not, also the tonic. Working out whether the track is major or minor takes a similarly vague description - just play through the major scale a few times while the track is playing, then play through the minor scale and see which one sounds better. I'd love to be able to explain it better, but hopefully most people with a bit of musical experience will have an idea of what I mean. I should probably add that you should make sure you're listening the track at its original speed while doing all of this, i.e. if it's on a turntable or CD deck, make sure the pitch control is set to 0%. 4. Watch Your Speed... One of the things that can really confuse harmonic mixing (and the people trying to do it) is the effect the speed at which you're playing the track has. To explain this, let's assume you've worked out the keys of some of your records and you've got two tracks in C minor you want to mix, but one is quite a bit faster than the other. If you beatmatch these tracks together, you'll have to either speed one up or slow the other one down. Let's say that the difference in speed is such that with one left at 0%, the other has to be sped up to +6%. They'll no longer be in key, as changing the playback speed also changes the pitch (and hence the key) at which it plays back. A pitch offset of about 6% is equivalent to moving up or down one key, so the track we are speeding up becomes Db minor at +6%. If you were then to mix these tracks together (one in C minor and one now in Db minor), they'd clash more spectacularly than Millwall away to West Ham on the last day of the clearance sale at Fireworks R Us - which really isn't what we're after. There are two main ways around this. The first is by far the simplest and relies on technology: the Master Tempo or Pitch Lock feature found on many CD decks, a lot of DJing software and some turntables. This processes the sound such that changing the playback speed of the track only changes the speed and not the pitch, hence keeping the key the same at any speed. If you turn this on, you don't have to worry about the speeds of the records at all in harmonic mixing, it's as simple as that... almost. On the cheaper models the Master Tempo algorithms aren't as good and do strange things at speeds outside +/- 2%, which ironically is the range within which you don't actually need it (as explained shortly). In my experience, the only CD decks with a good enough Master Tempo to really help with harmonic mixing is the Pioneer CDJ1000 mk2 and mk3. The Pioneer CDJ800 doesn't cut it and nor does what I've heard of the equivalent feature on the Denon CD decks. Where's the Master Tempo button on my CDJ? There it is! If you haven't got access to CDJ1000s or you want to guard against situations where you might be faced with other equipment in a club, there's a second way around the speed problem. The rule of thumb I use (some dispute this, discussed later) is that you can just about get away with tracks being up to 2% apart in pitch. Any more than that and it'll sound pretty horrible. So what you can do is try beatmatching the tracks and if the difference between the two pitches is more than 2%, try a different record (or work around it - see the Putting It Into Practice section next week for discussion on when and how to use harmonic mixing). Remember that it's the difference in speed between the two tracks that matters. If two tracks are normally in the same key, but both happen to be sped up to +6% when they're beatmatched, they'll still be in the same key. If (again, once beatmatched) one track is at +4% and the other is at +5%, then by my rule of thumb they'll sound fine, but if they were +4% and +6.5% they probably won't. There is another version of this second method which takes a bit more time to prepare but gives you more warning of tracks which will be incompatible due to their speeds: marking tempos. With music between 120 and 150 BPM, the 2% rule of thumb can be translated to a tempo difference of about 2.5 BPM (the faster the music, the bigger the allowance so people playing at 150 BPM and faster can allow a difference of up to 3 BPM). So if you know the keys AND tempos of all of your records, you can tell just by looking at these whether two tracks are likely to mix harmonically - if the keys match and the tempos are within 2.5 BPM of each other, go for it. Most key-finding software will also be able to calculate the tempo of a track, or you can just very crudely start a stop-watch and count how many beats you hear in 60 seconds, as BPM stands for 'beats per minute'... clever, innit? That’s it for Part One of this special. Try finding out the keys of some of your tracks and practise mixing them together. Next week we’ll look at adding extra keys, the Camelot system and some tips and tricks. Images used for educational purposes only. Not to be reproduced without permission. Share this :: : : : Follow HarderFaster :: Other Features By Stu Cox: Fine-tune your sets with some Harmonic Mixing: Part Two F12 Hours Reviewed: Swedish House comes home to Stockholm Mike Foyle Breaks Out for Electronic Sessions Everyone Wants Free Records: an interview with musical genius Louk The views and opinions expressed in this review are strictly those of the author only for which HarderFaster will not be held responsible or liable. Comments: From: dj dk on 2nd Apr 2009 20:11.52 what kind of fucking trombone is that! From: sparkleberry* on 2nd Apr 2009 22:28.11 Lots of useful tips there! Thank you! From: Technikal on 3rd Apr 2009 16:54.31 I used to mix like this using the Camelot system, re arranged my whole CD wallet like it and think I ended up playing about 3 gigs in total under the system. What I didn't like was the fact that if I was playing a track that was 3 or 4 BPM higher/lower it would completely throw it out. And I hate using Master Tempo because I find it really degrades the sound. On top of that it's horrible having to limit yourself to a selection of records that you can or can't play next ... I found it a bit limiting but I've seen it really work for some people, just not for me! From: K8-e on 3rd Apr 2009 18:51.16 Very funny, well written but most of all informative. Top work Stu From: Zoolander on 4th Apr 2009 13:22.44 Another trick if you know the keys of tracks is to move up one key from track to track e.g. C -> C# -> D -> ... etc. Rather than the tracks being harmonically compatible this has the effect of the next track seemingly raising the energy level from the last. Really good for trance/hard dance progression. From: Stu Cox on 5th Apr 2009 14:39.23 It's a Yamaha YSL 354 I believe Dave. Why do you ask? Are you looking to purchase one? From: Stu Cox on 5th Apr 2009 14:40.52 And Alf - the next part of this article addresses everything you've mentioned and explains how you can make it less limiting, and how it shouldn't be treated as a hard and fast rule so actually needn't limit you at all. From: Mark. on 6th Apr 2009 10:25.04 A great idea in theory, but I've always found that the majority of club-goers are tone deaf and wouldn't know a key clash if it jumped up and smacked them in the face. Sigh, some of the most popular tunes in clubs are badly made, have wrong notes or clashing melodies. From: Benton Wells on 6th Apr 2009 17:37.07 i liek Yorkie bars From: IRIDIUM on 15th Apr 2009 21:38.16 "Sigh, some of the most popular tunes in clubs are badly made, have wrong notes or clashing melodies." Hahaha!

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