KeyFinders – Preferences?

Here’s the thing though, and there is another thread on here where I go much deeper into this stuff, “as good as it is”, isn’t good enough imho.

Let’s say an average night is 4 hours @ 15 tracks per hour = 60 tracks.

With MIK you get 3 tracks that are not the right key. You put in something else when you hear it (when prepping the mix, or even when making your mini-playlists at home).
With KeyFinder that number goes up to 14 tracks wrong. That is almost 5 (FIVE) times as many. It means every 4th track is off, instead of every 20th.

To me that is the difference between an acceptable failure rate and frustration.

Imho, if you enter 1000 tracks into your collection (a reasonable starting point) the software will have been worth it’s purchasing price. Any tracks after that, it’s pretty much been written off at that point.

I personally can’t tell if the key is wrong in an absolute sense. So if Keyfinder would tell me key X and I played the song on its own, I couldn’t tell you if it was or wasn’t key X or Y.

The only way to tell for me would be to mix this track into another track I KNOW (how?) to be in the key noted and hear that they are not the same. Not all that bad in a home environment while prepping mini-playlists, but not something I like in a live environment. As my numbers example showed, if you use Keyfinder it will happen 5 times as many as with files done with MIK.

Obviously harmonic mixing is a tool, you should still trust your ears. Some songs sound bad together even if they are in compatible keys while other tracks work just fine even when they are supposedly not compatible. So Keyfinder or Mixed In Key should not be a substitute for listening and knowing your tracks and just plain old experimenting.

It’s another reason to keep your collection modest, it gives you more time to play around with various combinations of tracks. The more 1-on-n options you have for each track, the more flexible you are in moving in any given direction.

1-on-n means you have multiple options to connect to from the 1 you are playing. A 1-on-2 track for instance gives you only 2 possible next tracks that work well. A 1-on-10 track, obviously, would give you 10 different tracks to mix into. And the only way to find that out is to experiment. When I play a certain song, often my brain will start firing off a list of potential next tracks (even if I haven’t tried them together). It sounds like “oh, this tracks would be good or I could play this one know or I can play this track I haven’t played in like forever”. In those cases I don’t even look at the key, just drop a track in the deck, hit play and listen.