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Fine-tune your sets with some Harmonic Mixing: Part Two Reported by Stu Cox / Submitted 08-04-09 12:39 Continuing our two part special on Harmonic Mixing, this week Stu Cox takes you though adding extra keys, the Camelot system and lots more tips and tricks! 5. Adding Some Extra Keys So far, I've just talked about matching records in the same key. There are 12 notes in an octave, so with both major and minor keys that's a total of 24 keys, plus if you haven't got decent Master Tempo you're limited to mixing tracks of quite similar speeds. This is the main criticism of harmonic mixing, that it restricts what you can play when. So let's try to do something about it. Because there are more keys than there are notes, a lot of keys are very similar to one another and some even have all of the same notes - C major and A minor for example both consist of all of (and only) the white notes. If we were to mix two tracks which are in differing keys, but keys containing nearly all of the same notes, very few notes will clash so it tends to work quite well. This we can use to our advantage, because it means we're not just limited to mixing tracks in exactly the same key. There is an easy way to find these similar keys: thanks to the relationships between notes in music, those near-matching keys are always the keys of the 4th and 5th notes of the scale - these are F major and G major respectively in the case of C major. Also, as in the C major and A minor case, every key has another key with exactly the same notes, known as a complementary key (or relative major/minor, as appropriate). The complementary key of a major key is always minor and vice versa. Using these rules, we can build up a table of the keys which will work with any given key: Use this to work out what will mix nicely with what. 6. Adding Even More Keys - My Little Secret Most harmonic mixing DJs only go as far as I've explained so far: from each key, you can mix into the same key or one of three other matching keys. That means that from any one track, you've got 1/6 (assuming 24 different keys) of your collection available to you to choose your next track. That's still nowhere near enough for me. Even if you consider that the vast majority of your tracks are in minor keys, it's still no more than 1/4. The bold leap I make to free this whole thing up a bit more is to ignore the difference between major and minor keys. Musical theorists tend to shoot me down for this, but it works. And here's why: many dance tracks have very little harmonic content - a track in C major will hit a few Cs, a few Fs, a few Gs and so on. The notes that distinguish C major from C minor are E/Eb and A/Ab - if neither of these are present, then you can't actually distinguish between them. And the place they're least likely to occur is in the intro and outro of the track - normally the bit that you're mixing. If you work through it, you'll see that this adds another key for you to mix with any given key: the key of the 3rd or 6th note of the scale, depending on whether it's a minor or major key you started with. In the case of C, we've now got Eb, F, G and A (as well as C itself) that will match. Note I'm leaving out the major/minor part, because I'm no longer defining the keys as either of these. This also reduces the total number of keys we're working with to 12, so we've now got 5/12ths - nearly half of our collection - to play with from any tune we might play (assuming they're roughly the right speed, or we've got decent Master Tempo at our fingertips). Now we've got a smaller but better and more flexible key table than before, which is starting to make harmonic mixing much more attractive: Our awesome new key table. But (and this a large, plump, swelling but, probably covered in cellulite thanks to excessive comfort eating as a child) to get these extra keys I've had to make some assumptions about the musicality of the tracks. For this reason, I call these rough matches, as we can't guarantee they'll always be clash free (but hopefully they will be a lot of the time). These will work when one or other of the tracks doesn't contain a lot of melodic content, for example if the notation in the track is very simple, or at the start/end of a track when the only notes present are a simple bassline. 8. The Camelot System Some clever guy (called Mark Davis) came up with a way of using the musical relationships to make it easier to know what keys match, by assigning each key a number and a letter in a modified version of what's known as the 'circle of fifths', which he called the Camelot Wheel: The Camelot Wheel - 12 pairs of keys, like the 12 Knights of the Round Table - very clever, although historians believe there were actually more than 12 knights and the table was actually egg-shaped. Nice try though. Using this, you can find a matching key by going to any adjacent segment - so a track in 5A will mix well with another one in 5A or one in 4A, 5B or 6A. The numbering makes it really easy to remember, so you can do it without the wheel (just remember you can either change the letter or go up or down by 1 number). A lot of DJs use and prefer this to having the chart above - which is great. The only problem is that it doesn't support the extra keys I described in the section Adding Even More Keys earlier, so it's hard to use the Camelot system without limiting the number of tracks available to you or tweaking the chart a bit, but I guess it's up to you, the DJ, to decide whether it's worth it. 7. Putting it into Practice I'm a firm believer that harmonic mixing is merely a tool to be used in a DJ set and shouldn't be considered a hard and fast rule by any means. So far I've explained the situations in which two tracks will mix harmonically - so does that mean that if a track isn't going to mix harmonically with the current track, you shouldn't play it? Of course not, silly! In my opinion, the great thing about harmonic mixing isn't being able to pick tracks which will mix harmonically - it's knowing whether or not the track you want to play will mix harmonically with the one already playing. If you know two tracks are going to be harmonic, you can really draw the mix out, get the two tracks running together and working together. If you know they're not, you could just chose another record, or you could go ahead with it and mix appropriately to avoid a clash - maybe by doing quite a sharp or sudden mix, maybe using the EQ quite heavily, or maybe by mixing quite late once the melodic content has finished, or however you want to do it. Again, if you have two tracks which are a "rough match" (as I explained earlier), think about the content - if both of the tracks have quite a lot of melodic content (vocal trance for example) then you'll want to mix appropriately to avoid a clash, but if not then make the most of it and work the two together. If you use harmonic mixing this way, you can still pick tracks as you always have done before. Is this tune going to go off right now? Is it going to work with the previous track? Is it going to take my set in the right direction? And then you can check the keys (and possibly tempos) to see if it's going to match, before deciding what to do about it if it doesn't. Alternatively, you can think of it as a "trick" - mix how you've always mixed, then when you really want to make a mix sound amazing pick a harmonic mix. There are loads of suggestions out there of key combinations that can give various effects - a lift or whatever, but I'm not going to cover them now, if you're interested, get Googling. 9. Solving the Controversy A lot of DJs see harmonic mixing as some kind of evil which poisons a set and takes the DJs mind off more important things. Here I'll attempt to combat the common attacks and explain why I think it's a good idea to at least give it a try. It restricts the tracks you can play. If you only mix harmonically for a set, particularly if you're just sticking to the main matching and complementary keys, you are quite limited in what you can play. The fear is that DJs will base their choice of tracks more on their keys than whether they're right for that point in their set and the crowd they're playing to. This can happen and it's quite easy to get sucked into it when you first start harmonic mixing, but if you treat it as "a tool, not a rule" as I explained above, it shouldn't become an issue. A set is really boring if it's all in the same key. This is a naive view - I've explained how every key has multiple matching keys, so even if you did mix purely harmonically for a whole set, you can easily end up playing through all of the keys. The tracks have to be exactly the same speed to be in key. As discussed, good Master Tempo stops the speed from being an issue at all. In the absence of Master Tempo, the rule of thumb I use is +/- 2%. I know people who say that they can tell when something is detuned as little as 0.3% and as a result disapprove of harmonic mixing without Master Tempo. While this may be true when listening to a single guitar string and tuning it, I personally believe that two pieces of music detuned from one another by as much as 1% will sound in the same key to everyone. Some with well-trained hearing may be able to tell it's not quite perfect, but it will still sound in key and thus the purpose of harmonic mixing will come through. It takes too much preparation / it takes too much thought when you're DJing. I'm afraid this is one thing I don't have an answer for. The major drawback is that it is time-consuming and can take a lot of concentration in the booth. You don't necessarily have to go through your whole collection working out the keys (and possibly tempos) - to get started, I'd recommend just doing a handful of tracks and going from there. It's then up to you to decide whether it's going to be worth it. So... I hope I've given you enough of an in-depth instruction manual here to know your arse from your E minor and helped to alleviate some of the confusion in harmonic mixing. With any luck some of the cynics might now be thinking "ok, maybe it's not that bad!" Go on, give it a go. Images used for educational purposes only or from the HarderFaster archive. Not to be reproduced without permission. Share this :: : : : Follow HarderFaster :: Other Features By Stu Cox: Fine-tune your sets with some Harmonic Mixing: Part One 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: Andy Dunford on 8th Apr 2009 16:33.12 Great article. I used to be quite religious about harmonic mixing when I first started but it is limiting and now I tend to mix more by ear. Part of the problem was that I'm rubbish at keying up my tracks. The website I used to get keys of tracks suddenly had an "upgrade" which basically made it shit so I don't have the key info for a lot of my later tracks. In a way this has helped me a lot because I don't worry about it so much any more. I particularly liked the "extra keys in most cases" bit. I think the important thing is not necessarily to look for a tune that mixes harmonically with the previous tune but to ensure you don't pick one that clashes with it! That said, going up a 4th or a 5th does sound lovely sometimes From: El Hombre on 27th Apr 2009 14:32.57 Didn't understand any of that. Can you explain it again to me from the begining. From: profbarkingmad on 5th May 2009 20:45.43 This reminds me of a related technique/theory that I have dabbled with for some time. Pitch and tempo are two sides of the same coin. Speed up a beat and eventually it becomes a pitch (ever clocked up a digital delay so fast that the echoes become a note?). This is probably more useful for music production than for live DJing, unless there is a digital deck unit out there somewhere with tempo to pitch sync software built in. Take the note A, 440Hz (cycles per second), then there will be 440X60 = 2640 cycles per minute. If we keep dividing by a whole number (2 is the obvious starter), then dividing by 256 produces 103.125 cycles (or beats!) per minute. In other words, a tune in the key of A has a natural tempo of 103.125 bpm, so that there are an exact number of cycles of the note inside each beat. This sounds REALLY tight! Of course, related harmonic keys such as C or G work just as well at this tempo, or you can calculate using the number 3 or factors like 3/2. The basic formula is:- Tempo = pitchX60/256 or Tempo = pitchX0.234375 The table for the 12 keys in standard equally-tempered pitch i (you might want to re-check my calculations) is:- A(440) =103.125bpm Bflat(466.164)=109.257bpm B(493.883)=115.754bpm C(523.251)=122.637bpm Csharp(554.365)=129.929bpm D(587.330)=137.655bpm Eflat(622.254)=145.841bpm E(659.255)=154.513bpm F(698.456)=163.701bpm Fsharp(739.989)=173.435bpm G(793.991)=183.748bpm we used call this the god chart! Obviously you can divide/multiply by 2 (or3) to get faster/slower tempos, and it's not limited to standard concert pitch (440), just re-calculate - I will trawl the web to see if any bit of kit has this facility built in yet.

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