Hi,
today I'd like to to suggest a feature that I don't find in any mixing software today I'm aware of and yet is a technique used by almost all professional DJs: Key aware mixing or chromatic mixing.
For those who don't know what I'm talking about let me try to explain it without digging too deep into music theory. Whenever you are mixing two tracks that have root keys that don't "fit" together you always have to beware mixing two sections with any kind of "melody/singing/..." in parallel because the disharmonic this would create awkward looks on the peoples faces listening to you
On the other hand if you have two tracks with compatible root keys you really can go crazy mixing almost any parts of one song into another and it would sound good (in harmony). For instance when you want to do a so called mashup of two or more songs you have to make sure that the keys match up.
There is a lot of musical theory behind what key is compatible with other keys. I can highly recommend to anyone who is mixing/producing music to dig deeper into the concept of harmonics in music. However there is a cheatsheet called Camelot Wheel where you can easy determine what key would fit to the other without being a expert in music theory.
Here is link explaining what it's all about:
http://www.harmonic-mixing.com/HowTo.aspxWhile this concept is not new at all, in the pre-digital era of DJing key aware mixing was a huge huge "pain in the ass". First of all you have to determine the key of every song for instance with a keyboard (which alone is not easy at all and requires some musical knowledge) and write it down somewhere. And since you have to beatmatch the tracks the shift in pitch also shifts your key of course. Approximately every 6% pitch you shift the key by a semitone. So even if you consider all of this you can almost never be accurate because you pitch for most of the time is somewhere inbetween the 6% steps. I hope that all makes some kind of sens for you
Here is the good News: In times of pitch corrected master-tempo in our advanced digital equipments we always stay in the same key (poor vinyl guys
) no matter how we change the tempo of our tracks. So all we need is to find the keys of our tracks. And I know that there are software algorithms out there that are able to determine the root keys of songs (like the once determining the BPM). But sadly I know of no DJ mixing Software as today that include such a feature. Only stand-alone software is available as of today (as far as i know).
Another really cool chromatic trick is so called "energy boost mixing" - it's increasing the key with every track by one or two semitones. This creates a psychoacoustic effekt of increasing the "energy" of your mix track by track - and of course it works the other way around by reducing the key by one or two semitones on the next track (for instance you want to chill your audience down).
http://community.mixedinkey.com/Topics/1621/how-to-energy-boost-mixingSo all of this said imagine our beloved Cross DJ incooperating chromatic mixing support. You can really go crazy with that idea:
- Cross shows the keys of each track in your library including color coding the keys like in the camelot scale (you would see instantly which tracks would harmonize and which not)
- imagine Cross gives you for every track you play a pre-selection of tracks that are key-compatible to the one playing
- or a energy-boosting (or energy-releasing) track pre-selection of
your library
- sometimes songs have a key change. how about a optical marker in the waveform-view to see where that key-changes are happening (and what the keys are)
- how about pitching a song to get in a compatible key to the one that is playing (of course that would only work when the calculated pitch is within an acceptable threshold)
... and of course infinite more things i just can't think about yet. maybe you can?
I know that this is a feature request that Mixvibes can't pull off in a week or month. But
that would make this already great software really stand out amongst the others. Maybe you could team up with a company that already have key-determination algorithms going on.
To get an idea what you can do with it check this out:
http://soundcloud.com/mixedinkey/shane-54-mixed-in-key-demoHard to believe that this are 32 songs mixed in 5 minutes
What do you guys think about it?
many greets
cipher