Harmonic Mixing

[Basilisk]

Are there any DJs out there employing harmonic mixing in the field? Has anyone looked into it in detail? I'm curious to know if this is catching anywhere, and how people are working with the concept, if they are at all.

 

I'm still waiting to find a harmonically mixed set for download somewhere - I've yet to find one. I think it might be interesting to go back and check to see if any of the commercially released mixes in the days of Goa were harmonically mixed. Anyone know more about that?

 

I'd also like to talk to some experts to vet some articles I'm writing on the subject, if possible.

[pr0fane]

I have read a lot about it, and in theory it sounds very interesting. Still, I haven't really experimented with it myself - I still have enough trouble just matching the kicks

[Guest]

Hmm... if you use pitch adjustment you are out of any scale... and if you can't use pitch adjustment how you gonna match the beats?

[GaySatanicHippie]

Master tempo is your friend!! only works for CDs, though

[Guest]

Hmm... if you use pitch adjustment you are out of any scale... and if you can't use pitch adjustment how you gonna match the beats? 

382212[/snapback]

Provided you stick within +/- 3% then the pitch remains close enough to mix harmonically, which means mixing Psytrance harmonically is a lot easier than other genres with everything being at 145 fucking bpm anyway and +/- 3% gives you a 141 - 149 window.

 

This set is more or less harmonically mixed if anyone is bothered:

http://www.monkeydo.org/2005/01/new-downlo...ic-twisted.html

[Krell]

Master tempo is your friend!! only works for CDs, though

382217[/snapback]

Master Tempo distorts.

 

At least on my cdj100s

 

Best Wishes

 

Krell

[Basilisk]

I strongly recommend not using master tempo - especially considering how overproduced psytrance is these days.

 

One can pitch the music up and down a little before the key sounds different to the human ear... I think this is an arbitrary thing. I hold to +/- 2 BPM personally.

 

I think the perception of harmony has something to do with the following write-up, but I find it a little hard to follow:

http://www.everything2.net/index.pl?node_id=1348772

 

If anyone can explain that a little better, I would welcome some revelation on the subject.

[Guest]

I keep my sets in key. When I get a new track I use a synth to figure out what the root note is for the song. Thus keeping my set in key. You can then go up and down scales. (I guess that would give harmonics by mixing into a different key) For example going up a 3rd, 5th, 7th or a 9th. Not too much you can do with two keys. Kinda plays off like a power chord, but it works. Good to know a bit about scales for this (I use a cheat sheet) Guess it depends on the track, some tracks have a flat kick at the end with no bassline, some have the leads and tonnes of percussion up to the end, some tracks you just want to give them a good old fashioned beach party ambient mix. Depends on the crowd too. Good to know your tracks endings as much as possible.

 

oddly enough, in my experience, I find different keys have different energy on the dance floor. G and G# are quite bouncy, and E and F are quitte tribal. hmmm...

 

I do use the master tempo on cdj100's, and it locks them in to the pitch. I leave it on, so if it's changing the pitch a bit... it's the same for every track, so it still keeps it in key.

 

hope this helps anyone.

 

smiles.

chris (Phantasm Records)

 

I've been using this system for over a year now, and give credit to Treavor (Phantasm/Moontribe) for showing it to me.

[Guest]

oh ya,

I use this when I use a sample from a movie that has background music. then pitch it into key for the song I'm working on...

 

I put my entire live set in key for the one on halloween, but it wasn't for the summer one.

I had one transition in halloween where the scales didn't fit, so I kinda fudged it.

 

 

[fohat]

timestretching in high quality is possible within traktor dj studio (good cpu needed)

 

you can easily mix for example 138 tracks with 145 tracks without any disturbing or disharmonic notice as long as the overall feeling of both tracks is similar. vice versa it works also pretty good: if i really want to mix two tracks together (both have same tempo) although the key is different, i increase the key -maximum half tone- of one track to get it similar to the other one. this works not always but brought me often times good results.

 

both methods i combine to get some kind of harmonic mixing (still need to learn a lot about harmonys)

[Jikkenteki]

Personally I find the whole harmonic mixing thing kind of overboard for a whole set. I do have some hamonically matched mixes I like to do here and there, but rarely more than 3 tracks in a row. From a purely musical point of view, I don't want to hear 1 or 2 hours of music all in related key sig.s. Its simply musically uninteresting after awhile. Music theory is good and all, but the best comment I ever heard while I was in music school was that "music theory is there to explain why something worked or didn't work. It's NOT there for you to create music with." Basically all the things used in harmonic mixing are in the catagory of info we were taught to "learn and then forget". Basically harmonic mixing to me is just another tool. Its useful sometimes, but it is just one of many tools to be used when it fits. Just use your ears. If it works and sounds good, it is good....

[RAH]

Personally I find the whole harmonic mixing thing kind of overboard for a whole set. I do have some hamonically matched mixes I like to do here and there, but rarely more than 3 tracks in a row. From a purely musical point of view, I don't want to hear 1 or 2 hours of music all in related key sig.s. Its simply musically uninteresting after awhile. Music theory is good and all, but the best comment I ever heard while I was in music school was that "music theory is there to explain why something worked or didn't work. It's NOT there for you to create music with." Basically all the things used in harmonic mixing are in the catagory of info we were taught to "learn and then forget". Basically harmonic mixing to me is just another tool. Its useful sometimes, but it is just one of many tools to be used when it fits. Just use your ears. If it works and sounds good, it is good....

384450[/snapback]

nicely put

 

not mentin you need a crapload of music, to stitch together a set of 2-3 hours on similar BPM's on the same note... of tracks you actually like well enough to play...

[dmtree]

just use your ears.

[Basilisk]

You can change key and mix harmonically... there's no need to stick to one key!

 

I've been mixing all my live sets harmonically this summer... yes you need a crapload of music - luckily I've got that.

 

My recent experiment in harmonic mixing led to a 13 track journey that actually circles around the harmonic wheel from start to finish. This was incredibly difficult to accomplish, and there are some odd choices on the mix because of it, but it blends together very nicely I would say.

 

I think it's important that mixes work and sound good; harmonic mixing is one way to significantly increasing the chances that you will get the best mix possible, or so I find. There are some truly beautiful blends you can create if you have a good idea of what you're doing...

 

 

Using your ears works well in many situations but not all of them... so here's a challenge. Find a song that mixes beautifully with Ticon's Reflections from around 2:56 onwards, and let me know what it is. Maybe you'll get lucky...

[Guest]

Harmonic mixing is the advanced way to make a story in a dj set. I personally do it everytime, and I can tell you the flow in the mix is simply amazing. The interaction with the crowd is also more tight, so you can almost make people hyper or downer according to which key you're mixing, if it one key up (happyness felling), or one key down (nostalgia feeling). There is too long to say about it, one only thing: it is not for wanabees dj's that for sure.

[Jikkenteki]

You can change key and mix harmonically... there's no need to stick to one key!

 

384482[/snapback]

I'm quite aware of that. My complaint is that even when changing keys, the key changes chosen are usually the "obvious" ones (major or minor thirds, fifths, etc) since they are safe and things when are used to hearing. This sounds good, but I want some tension/resolution in some mixes as well, which usually isn't a factor in most people's harmonic mixing.

 

Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against harmonic mixing at all and being a former music major I'm all for people exploring how music works in more depth. Harmonic mixing has great potential, but I think the ideal end result with harmonic mixing and music theory in general is learn it, use it, internalize it, abandon it. Unfortunately most people never advance beyond "use it" and then in rather simplistic ways. If you are going do harmonic mixing, then do it right and study it in depth (which Basilisk seems to be doing), unfortunately most dj's I have talked to who are mixing harmonically it aren't doing it with any depth of study.

 

The end result is still "use your ears", although a DJ who has done serious harmonic mixing study (which I think will take roughly a year to do well, give or take for individual talent) will have an advantage since their ear is "educated" as it were. BTW I think DJs who came to DJing with a solid background in some other musical instrument pretty much have the same advantage so one's milage in study harmonic mixing might vary

[dmtree]

The end result is still "use your ears", although a DJ who has done serious harmonic mixing study (which I think will take roughly a year to do well, give or take for individual talent) will have an advantage since their ear is "educated" as it were. BTW I think DJs who came to DJing with a solid background in some other musical instrument pretty much have the same advantage so one's milage in study harmonic mixing might vary

385401[/snapback]

yeah, musical education makes a big difference.. i studied music seriously for many years, so I can usually trust my ears to tell me what chord i'm about to create, and what kind of mood it's going to set.

 

But I think anyone can do it just as well with a bit of practice - learning how to recognize certain tones and progressions of chords isn't that hard if you have the ear for it and are willing to put some time into it. Also I think listening to a lot of classical music can help in that respect, since classical music is built on harmonic progressions.

 

Harmonically mixed sets do sound a lot better, btw..

[Guest Rain]

I'm working on and old skool mix right now... it is more night goatrance but melodic...

 

will be on line on this site in two weeks I hope...

 

but it's damn hard to mix old skool... fucking changing bmp all the time

[dmtree]

so ummm...

 

check this out: new Pionner DJM 800 mixer.. http://pssl.com/bitemdetail.tpl~waGroup1da...~%5BcatGroup%5D

 

here's a quip:

 

Harmonic Mixing Capability: The world’s first “Auto Harmonic Tuning” function detects the key of song and automatically corrects it to the closest harmonic key by sampling the key the song is in and moving it to the closest “standard pitch” key. Of course a DJ still has to know some basics about music, such as which keys match, in order to do a sonically perfect harmonic mix.

 

not sure what to think.. but would like to try it out.

[niobium]

This is an interesting topic. Although I don't know anything about music

theory, my spidey sense tells me I may be of use here.

Let me have a read...or did you figure it all out yet??

 

 

 

 

I strongly recommend not using master tempo - especially considering how overproduced psytrance is these days.

 

One can pitch the music up and down a little before the key sounds different to the human ear... I think this is an arbitrary thing. I hold to +/- 2 BPM personally.

 

I think the perception of harmony has something to do with the following write-up, but I find it a little hard to follow:

http://www.everything2.net/index.pl?node_id=1348772

 

If anyone can explain that a little better, I would welcome some revelation on the subject.

383356[/snapback]

[Otto Matta]

I'm an amateur DJ but with some music theory education, and I've always been annoyed by DJs who don't mix harmonically. There's nothing worse than the dissonance created when two tracks in different keys collide for a minute or however long. So I do my best to mix in key, but it's certainly a ton more effort than mixing normally. And yeah, pitch control - on CDJ 100s at least - is very sketchy.

 

Interesting topic, though!

[electric blue]

harmonic mixing prolongs trance state, and if you (anyone) want some harmonically mixed sets, you can listen to my radio program every wednesday. i usually go 1 round around the harmonic wheel, so you can hear tracks in any key.

 

www.radyobogazici.net --> canli yayin --> choose server

every wednesday 17.00 - 19.00 (gmt)

 

 

edit: deleted something

[Basilisk]

Harmonic Mixing Capability: etc blah blah, in order to do a sonically perfect harmonic mix.

 

not sure what to think.. but would like to try it out.

435026[/snapback]

It looks interesting. I'd give that a shot...

 

and a side note, tracks in most of the complitations and albums are in harmonical order..

435124[/snapback]

How do you figure? Not by my reckoning. Trance has distributed bottlenecks across the wheel where there are very few songs in some style, so I can't see this being possible. How do you find the key for your music?

[Basilisk]

Since the thread has come up again, I should say... the 13 track experiment I spoke of earlier is actually my newly released mix entitled Mystic Revelation. Feedback from people in the know would be appreciated.

 

A word on the intended structures... as I've mentioned, I don't have any classical training in music, so I could have made a mistake somewhere... but as far as I know, this mix descends through the harmonic spectrum from keycode 5, 4, 3, etc. all the way around the wheel and back to where it started in keycode 5. I've had people tell me they feel like they are "falling down the rabbit hole", which is obviously the desired effect. There's a lot of guess work going on though

[electric blue]

How do you figure? Not by my reckoning. Trance has distributed bottlenecks across the wheel where there are very few songs in some style, so I can't see this being possible. How do you find the key for your music?

435414[/snapback]

checking some albums, I figured that what i stated is not right. there is not full harmony (meaning everything is not put according to their wheelcode), but usually there are groups of 3 4 tracks harmonically ordered.

 

sorry again, my bad.

 

for the finding keys thing, and speaking about modern music (which uses the major-minor scale) you can determine the keys with a synth, or a program called mixmeister (which is %80 right)