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Best Way To Structure Sets For Harmonic Mixes

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  • September 1, 2015 at 9:45 pm #2247561
    DJ Vintage
    Moderator

    Hi Leif,

    First of all, it sounds like you are overthinking things. DJ-ing is not formula-based. It’s about music and emotions (the crowd’s primarily). It’s not uncommon to go from 75 BPM to 150 BPM in one set. While everyone uses different numbers, rule of thumb is that between 2-4% difference in speed is reasonable, although I know many will go as far as 10%. Personal choice.

    Another thing is to not make Harmonic mixing a RULE, it’s a TOOL at best. Using your ears is way more important.

    So songs not being in the same key does not necessarily mean they don’t go together. Also it means you might have to balance your track collection a bit more if you are that attached to harmonic mixing.
    If you only mix harmonically, I dare ventilate the following opinion: “Mixes that are 100% harmonic run an above-average risk of being boring”.

    Also, I am curious about your choice to start low BPM to high BPM. A set should have flow (no pun intended), it should have several high and low energy moments. Gotta give people a change to recharge, have a drink, talk to their friends. So typically I will go from low to high BPM and then either do a wild genre switch for example or in a few tracks slow down significantly.

    September 2, 2015 at 12:01 am #2247591
    Alex Moschopoulos
    Participant

    I think a good set is about building energy in peaks and valleys, taking the listener on a journey, and having variety where it’s not a hour of one sound, but not jumping all over the place either.

    When I say peaks and valleys, I mean over the whole set…not just over the course of a song.

    When I speak of variety, for me, it’s about staying around a set of genres that are similar, like the many flavors of deep house or the many flavors of trance…but you’re not playing a set of songs that sound exactly alike. You break up monotony with vocals, classics, interesting tunes, etc.

    September 2, 2015 at 7:09 am #2247681
    Leif
    Participant

    Such great feedback! Thank you both!!

    September 2, 2015 at 8:46 am #2247711
    Terry_42
    Keymaster

    Indeed the story of your set is important and I also find it important that a set is not 120BPM +/-2% all the time all perfectly beatmatched and flowing into one another.
    A really good set (and you can see that in all top performers) has some cuts and corners in there with weird (does not mean bad) transitions, huge BPM changes or a harmonic break. This done in the right moment will create a positive tension in the crowd and surprise them. Even can go cross genre.
    For example last weekend I was going hard for 3 or 4 tracks on really bumping 130BPM tracks and the crowd was so totally stocked that I had to get everything down a notch, so I pulled of a quick loop transition and followed up with “Get Lucky”, which was different genre and switch in BPM, but the crowd loved it and had a song to breathe through and take a sip of their drinks… (and the owner will love you for it)

    September 8, 2015 at 2:44 am #2250451
    DJ Strix
    Participant

    I think people need to take into account genre slightly more when it comes to harmonic mixing, for example a super minimal techno set (style of DJs like Ben Klock, Marcel Dettman, Sven Vath etc) HAS to be harmonically mixed or it just sounds awful. But harmonic mixing does not mean you cannot change key at all, the key wheel (http://www.harmonic-mixing.com/Images/camelotHarmonicMixing.jpg) is incredibly handy and allows you to really learn what key changes you can and can’t do and what impact they all have on the sound of the transition. Some are fairly small impacts but some like going up or down a “5th” can have a really large impact on the sound and create quite a euphoric or incredibly dark sounding change. In regards to BPM I tend to have a +/- 3% rule but as the previous comment mentioned this is just down to personal preference, but bear in mind that if you’re using key lock and try to change the bpm of a track too much the sound may start to distort. A handy trick for big bpm shifts I tend to find is to use tracks that have no beat in the intro, but even then doing this too much can create quite a stressful sound.
    Hope something in here was helpful, the information would be way more specific if it wasn’t 2 in the morning!

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