Here's a guide to harmonic mixing in general.
When you start mixing you might notice that when you mix some tracks together, they sound like crap. One of the reasons this might be is that the keys they are in are harmonically compatible. I’ll assume you know what a key is, a good guide to this and other musical things is
ravenspiral’s guide. I'll skip all the boring technical detail about why this is and jump to the punchline: there are only certain keys you can mix tracks with and have them sound nice.
Depending on how you mix, this can be a big problem. So how do you fix it? You need to learn how to mix harmonically. There’s different levels of harmonic mixing. At level one, you find out what keys all your tracks are in, and only mix together tracks that have harmonically compatible keys. At the next level, you transpose tracks to change their keys to make otherwise non-harmonic tracks compatible with each other.
Level one harmonic mixing:
At this level of mixing we need to know two things: what key are our tracks in, and what keys are compatible with each other?
What key are my tracks in?
Most western songs tend to converge to the tonic (the note the key is named after). If a track is in C, chances are the note where the song sounds like it is resolving is C. So if you listen to a track while plinking around on your keyboard, you will be able to figure out what key it is just listening. Depending on how much experience you have, it will take more or less time, but once you get the hang of it, it shouldn’t take you more than thirty seconds per track.
Another way to figure out what key your tracks are in is to use some software. If you have an enormous library of tracks that you want to mix harmonically with, that would take you days and weeks to do yourself, you’ll probably want to go the software rout. Purists will pooh-pooh you for doing this, but they don’t have to know, do they? You do have to be careful because sometimes the programs guess wrong as to what the key is, but they’re pretty reliable. There are two main programs out there, mixed in key and rapid evolution. Rapid evolution is free, so that’s the one I use (sh! Don’t tell anyone). In rapid evolution, once the program has detected the key, you have the option of displaying the keys in terms of flats (the key B flat minor is the same as A sharp minor, so you have a choice between displaying all the keys in terms of flats or sharps), sharps, or in a key code.
If you are reading this guide chances are you are not a music theory wiz, so displaying the key in terms of sharps and flats is not going to tell you much. If that’s the case, you will want to label your keys by a key code, a very useful tool for djs who want to mix in key. In rapid evolution, you go into options, hit the “general” tab, and in “key format” choose “key code” from the pull-down menu.
Another neat trick in rapid evolution (you can do this probably in mixed in key also but re is the program I’m familiar with) is, once the program has figured out what key your track is in, you can right click on the track, choose “database” and then “rename files.” One of the options you can choose in renaming your files is to stick the key code at the front. This is one way of keeping track what your keys are.
What keys are compatible with each other?
So now that you know what key all your tracks are in, how do you know which ones are compatible with each other?
If you are a music theory wiz, then you would know that harmonically compatible keys are related to each other by fourths and fifths (well, with the other caveat that they all have to be minor or all major). So, the keys that are harmonically compatible with C minor are F minor and and G minor, because F minor is a fourth away and G minor is a fifth away. One of the neat things about the way keys work is that if you keep moving up by a fifth (from C to G, from G to D, from D to A, etc.) you will, after doing this exactly 12 times, hit every single note in an octave. An even neater thing is if you do the same trick with fourths instead of fifths, not only will you hit all twelve notes, but the notes you will hit will be in exactly the reverse order of the notes you hit using fifths! Mind bending, isn’t it? Using this amazing property, you can make this little graphical device, called a Camelot wheel:
This is the ideal camelot wheel to use because it has both classic notation (A flat minor, B major, etc) and the numbering system. You’ll find out why this is useful in level two. As you go clockwise around the camelot wheel you are going up by fifths, and counterclockwise you are going up by fourths. Tricky! So keys that are adjacent to each other are harmonically compatible. F minor is to the left of C minor, and G minor is to the right of it. This is usually enough for music majors or piano players, but you’ll notice the Camelot wheel adds one more simplifying trick – it numbers the keys like the hours on a clock. A flat minor is 1A, then go clockwise (up a fifth) to E flat minor, 2A, up another fifth to B flat minor, 3A, and so on.
The beauty of this system is you can toss all your music theory out the window once you’ve labeled all your tracks with key codes. Are the numbers adjacent to each other? Then they’re harmonically compatible! Easy!
For example, suppose you’re playing a track in 8A (the vast majority of edm tracks are in minor keys, so I’ll use minor keys for my examples). If the next track is in 8A (the same key), 7A, or 9A, it will be harmonically compatible. If the track you’re playing is in 2A, the next track has to be 1A or 3A. And etc. Notice that, for any given track you play, only one fourth of your total collection will be harmonically compatible with it. Recall the examples above: if a track is in 8A, there are only three keys that are compatible with it, 7A, 8A, and 9A. The other nine keys are not compatible. That is one of the criticisms of mixing in key, that it severely limits your options as far as what you can mix with what. We’ll address this issue in level two.
Mixing from major to minor and vice versa:
Each minor key has one harmonically compatible major companion, where all the notes are the same. A minor is compatible with C major. The Camelot wheels shows this also, so all minor keys have A’s after them, while the major keys have B’s after them. While you can have nice harmonic effects going from one minor key to another that is a fourth or a fifth away, and similarly with major keys, when you are going from a major to a minor key (or vice versa) you’re essentially stuck with the one complementary key, you can’t go from A minor (8A) to G major (9B) with much success, it’ll sound weird.
Harmonic mixing on vinyl
I have been assuming you are using some sort of trick to hold the pitch of your track constant while you mix the other track in. Suppose you are using vinyl, or have a philosophical problem with using pitchlock. You have to keep in mind that as you change the tempo of your tracks to beatmatch them with each other, you are also potentially changing the keys. If you increase the pitch of a note by 6%, you have increased it by approximately one semitone. So if you are playing something in 100 bpm, and increase the tempo to 106 bpm, you have changed the key of the track by increasing it one semitone. If you normally mix everything within a range from 123 bpm to 130 bpm you don’t have to worry about it.
But! And there is an ENORMOUS but associated with mixing in key on vinyl, or on cdjs without pitchlock, or in ableton using repitch warping mode. If you are insisting on using vinyl, or repitch mode in ableton, or whatever, it must be because you claim to be an audiophile and can hear the difference between, say, repitch and complex mode in ableton, or the difference between a wav file and a 320 kbps mp3 file, or the difference between vinyl and cds. If your ear is that highly trained, then what do you think you will hear when you do the following:
Take a track in A minor, whose native bpm is 100. Mix it with another A minor track whose native bpm is 103. To beatmatch the two tracks, you will either have to increase the bpm of the first track by 3 percent, or lower the bpm of the second track by 3 percent. As a result, the two tracks will be, while harmonically compatible, HORRIBLY OUT OF TUNE WITH EACH OTHER! If you claim to be an audiophile, then playing two tracks that are this much out of tune will drive you completely out of your mind! In fact, I would argue that if you are a true audiophile, then playing two tracks in perfect tune in complex mode in ableton, or with pitchlock on your cdjs, will sound better than playing two harmonically compatible but out of tune lps on turntables. Whatever the improvement of sound quality is that you might get from using vinyl over some other medium will be overwhelmed by the nastiness of the tracks being out of tune. Same thing is true if you insist on using repitch mode instead of complex mode in ableton. Even people with untrained ears will not like hearing tracks that are out of tune, while only audiophiles can hear the difference between, say, repitch and complex mode. I’m just throwing that out there, to be provocative.
Step two: Transposing to add flexibility to harmonix mixing
So suppose you have tracks a and b and you want to mix them together. Well, if their keys are incompatible, it'll sound like crap and you're out of luck. But hold on! Suppose you're sitting there playing track a. Why not change (in musical lingo, transpose) track b's key to one that's compatible? So far what we’ve been discussing applies to any mixing medium that has pitchlock, but now we’re going to talk about something that, as far as I know, can only be done easily in ableton.
This is the transpose key:
Make sure you're using complex mode to warp! What we're about to do involves time stretching, and you'll get audio artifacts if you do this in beats mode. You should be using complex mode anyway, for precisely this reason.
This next part of the instructions assumes that you can hear key clashes when playing two tracks together. Play track a. Now cue up track b. Does it sound like it is mixing harmonically? No? Then turn the transpose knob one to the left and listen again.
Still not harmonic? Turn the transpose knob one to the left again.
Now here's the tricky bit -- if you're still getting a key clash, GO BACK TO ZERO.
Now, turn the transpose knob one to the right.
If you're still getting a clash, go one more to the right.
That's it -- by this time you have tested ALL POSSIBLE PERMUTATIONS. At least one of these is harmonic, and sometimes more than one is.
Seemingly we have added complete flexibility to our harmonic mixing, so in theory we can mix any track in our crate with any other track. However, it’s never that simple. Vocal tracks will sound awful when you do this, so it doesn’t work with them at all. Furthermore, most tracks will sound awful when you transpose by two semitones. So far all practical purposes, you are restricted to transposing up or down by one semitone. But if you really really really want to mix two tracks together, you’ll know you can at least cue it up and see what it sounds like, maybe you’ll get lucky. For example, if you’re going to do a mashup where you’ll be playing the two-semitone transposed track in the background, you might be able to pull it off.
Technical interlude 1:
Here's a technical explanation of why this method works. Remember the basic idea here is that you can reach all possible harmonic combinations by considering five permutations: -2 semitones, -1 semitone, 0 (don't do anything), +1 semitone, +2 semitones.
Suppose you've got a track that's in 12A. That track is harmonic with 11A, 12A, and 1A. Now transpose the track down by 1 semitone, from D flat minor to C minor. The track is now 5A, harmonic with 4A, 5A, and 6A. Transpose down by one semitone again and it is now B minor, 10A, harmonic with 9A, 10A, and 11A.
Go back to the original key, 12A, and transpose up by one semitone, from D flat minor to D minor, which is 7A, harmonic with 6A, 7A, and 8A. Transpose up again by one semitone and the track is now in E flat minor, 2A, harmonic with 1A, 2A, and 3A.
So those are our five permutations, which allow us to make the track harmonic with 1A (do nothing), 2A, and 3A (by transposing up two), 4A, 5A, and 6A (down 1), 7A, 8A (up one), 9A, 10A (down two), and 11A and 12A (by doing nothing). That's every possible key, and the same trick works no matter what key you start with.
Technical interlude 2: Level 2.5 – Flexible mixing without cueing
Just so you know in advance, this gets pretty technical. This is actually how I mix.
If you want to be able to mix harmonically automatically, without cueing, then you need to know what key all your tracks are in, so you have to have gone through the key identification steps in level one, and label all your tracks somehow. Now we will use the Camelot wheel above that has both the classical notation and the key code notation on it, because we’re going to need both.
So now you've got a track and, according to mixed in key, rapid evolution, or you're own plinking around on the keyboard, it is in, let's say, 12A, D flat minor. If you mix it with a track that is in 11A, 12A, or 1A, it's all good -- the next track will be harmonically compatible. But let's say the next track you have that you want to play is in 4A, F minor. You want to transpose the 4A track to something that is harmonically compatible with 12A, D flat minor, transposing as little as possible (because transposing is the same as holding the pitch constant and changing the bpm). Your options are 11A, 12A, or 1A, so let's look at the classic notation and see which one can we get to with the least amount of transposing. 11A is G flat minor, which you can get to by transposing the 4A track (F minor) up by one semitone.
Now let's do a harder one -- suppose the incoming track is 2A, E flat minor. Let's look at 11A, 12A, and 1A again and see which one is closest. G flat minor (11A) is three semitones away, D flat minor (12A) is two semitones away, and A flat minor (1A) is *counts on fingers* four semitones away (I think). So in this instance you would transpose down two semitones from E flat minor to D flat minor (12A).
If you were to do this exercise for each of the possible keys for your incoming track, you will find there is always at least one harmonic key within two semitones.
Not easy to explain. Once you've done it a few times though you'll get the hang of it.
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so I am less flexible with vocal-heavy tracks - try to bend an instrumental to fit the vocal instead of the other way around. Sometimes you can get away with it on a vocal but other times it sounds just awful...
