How to use Mixed In Key
What is Harmonic Mixing
Put simply, harmonic mixing helps ensure that your song transitions won’t clash, and it also opens up a wealth of possibilities for creative mixes.
What it is:
A way to improve your DJ sets
A creative way to mix songs together
An easy to learn technique that helps you sound perfect every time you play
What it’s not: a law of mixing. All rules are meant to be broken. Harmonic mixing isn’t a requirement to be a good DJ. It’s merely a useful technique to combine with the rest of your knowledge and skills.
Elements of Harmonic Mixing
There are three elements to harmonic mixing:
Analyzing your music files to figure out their musical key
Labeling all your music with the key results, so you can find the key quickly
Knowing which keys sound good together, and mixing with that in mind
Harmonic mixing also doesn’t mean you’re mixing in the same key for the entire night; instead, it means you’re mixing two songs together that are harmonically compatible.
The good news is that with the software and hardware available today, it’s really easy to do. As you work with the technique and train your ear to know when a mix is working musically, you’ll find that it can pay huge dividends on the dance floor.
Thankfully, you don’t have to study music theory to learn harmonic mixing. All you really need to know is that virtually every song you play as a DJ is in a certain key. Key names always start with the name of the root note (such as “C”) and the scale (minor). The scales are usually minor or major, so you will see key names like “D flat minor” and “E major” throughout this book.
If you’re not already familiar with musical keys, it will take a little time for you to learn the basics. Even if you’re not trying to mix harmonically, you might get lucky if, for example, you’re mixing a solo lead vocal over a monophonic (single-note) synth line. But when you’re mixing chords over chords, involving clusters of notes, you can run into dissonance, and that’s a bad thing. When mixing harmonically, you want both songs to sound as though they could have been part of the same piece of music, with a transition that feels smooth and natural. There’s an art to doing it right, and when you pull it off, your audience will sense it.
Mixed In Key: Finding the Keys of Your Music
After years of watching DJs like Sasha and Paul van Dyk, Mixed In Key founder Yakov Vorobyev could tell that they were mixing harmonically. Their sets were always flawless, but it wasn’t obvious how they found the various keys their tracks were in. The common method was to use a piano to find a song’s key beforehand, and then label each piece of vinyl accordingly–a thankless and time-consuming grind.
As a DJ himself, Yakov was spinning several nights per week, and he used the piano method to label all his tracks. Mixed In Key software was conceived as a solution to this problem. Why do all this work by hand, when it was possible to analyze and catalogue your entire music library without ever touching a piano?
In 2006, Yakov created Mixed In Key 1.0, which analyzed music files to determine the key of each song in seconds. The software was launched as a digital download on Mixed In Key’s website. Since then, the software has been updated over 20 times; version 8.1 was released in 2017.
Mixed In Key is a DJ tool that makes it easy to explore your music collection and find songs in the same or compatible keys. It also tags their metadata, so the results will show up on all your favorite DJ software and hardware. For its ease and elegance, and for the time it has saved professional DJs, Mixed In Key has become the industry standard for harmonic mixing.
