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Mixed in Key is changing the face of the DJ world as we know it. By analyzing your digital music files, Mixed in Key can detect the musical key of each one of your songs, and it actually writes the song’s musical key directly into the audio file, so you can view the musical keys in programs such as iTunes, Traktor, Ableton Live, Serato and more, allowing DJs to sort their playlists by key so you can quickly find tracks that are in harmony with each other. This $58 software can save you a lifetime of sitting in your DJ room with a piano writing all the keys on your record sleeves. You literally run your music collection overnight and the next day you are reborn as a harmonic mixing DJ and will never turn back!
While all of this is a dream come true for some, a lot of people argue about how accurate Mixed In Key really is. There have been studies out there comparing Mixed In Key’s results with musical databases, but the studies were mostly done for rock, Alternative, Pop and Top 40 Songs. What I wanted to see was how accurate Mixed In Key was for Dance Music. I took 200 of my best House, Tech House, Techno, Progressive House and Breaks tracks, and keyed them all one by one manually on a piano. I made a spreadsheet that compared all of my results with Mixed in Keys results.
I was able to gather some very interesting data about how accurate the program really is for the music I play. I double-checked all of the tracks to make sure my results were completely accurate.
If you’d like to see the entire chart with all of my results, you can view the chart here. If you look at the chart you will see that I noted Mixed In Key’s results, as well as my results from using the piano to figure out the key. I also looked up each tracks Genre on Beatport just for fun, and to get genre specific data. Out of all the data I collected here are some interesting facts I discovered based on the 200 Dance Music tracks I tested with.
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Five Facts About Mixed In Key
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Mixed In Key is 86% Accurate for Dance Music. Genre wise, I found that it correctly guessed 85% of my House, Progressive House, and Tech House. Electro House was 86% accurate. It was most accurate for breaks which were 93% Correct. Techno was least accurate out of all of the genres, and was 70% accurate. I was actually expecting a lot less than this based on an old test I did with Mixed In Key 3 (37% accurate for Techno). Big improvement!
Mixed in Key Incorrectly guessed the keys of 14% of my tracks. However I found that out of the tracks that were incorrectly guessed, 59% of those tracks were guessed to be in harmonically compatible keys. Out of the tracks that were incorrectly guessed by mixed in key, 32% were guessed to be in a subdominant or dominant key, which are harmonically compatible with each other (ex. 5A-C Minor was analyzed in M.I.K. as 6A-G Minor). And 11% of the tracks incorrectly analyzed in Mixed in Key were guessed to be in Relative Minor / Major keys (9A-9B), Subdominant / Dominant Major or Minor keys (9B-8A) which are also harmonically compatible.
I found that the program is just as accurate for major and minor keys based on my results. 88% of the tracks in major keys were guessed correctly while 87% of the tracks in minor keys were guessed correctly.
I also found that Mixed In Key correctly analyzed 100% of all of my tracks in A Minor! It guessed 25 out of 25 of my tracks in A Minor correctly. This was great news because A Minor is the most popular key in my music collection. Here is a mix I did entirely in the Key of A Minor. Result: A+ for Mixed In Key!
DJ Endo – Algorhythms in A Minor [Radio Mix] by DJ Endo
Mixed in Key also correctly analyzed every track that was in G Minor, which is my 3rd most popular key. I’ve found G Minor to be a very funky key. Here is a mix I did entirely in the key of G Minor. Mixed in Key also almost got all of my tracks in F Minor correct as well (94%), which happens to be my second most common key in my track collection:
DJ Endo – Algorhythms in G Minor [Radio Mix] by DJ Endo
Here is a mix I did entirely in the key of F Minor. B Minor and E Minor tracks were also very correctly guessed (92% accurate), and both keys are very popular in my collection as well as F sharp minor (90%):
DJ Endo – Algorhythms in F minor [Radio Mix] by DJ Endo
Here is a Mix I did in the key of F# Minor. The only key I noticed that was incorrectly guessed a lot was D Minor. Out of the 19 tracks in my study that were in D Minor, only 8 were guessed correctly (42%). Even so, when I add up all the results from the most popular keys that I play in, about 93% of the tracks in those keys were correctly guessed in mixed in key.
DJ Endo – Algorhythms in F sharp minor [Radio DJ Set] *Free Download* – WAV by DJ Endo
As you can see by these results Mixed In Key is a serious tool for DJ’s looking to improve their musicality, and is very accurate when analyzing the keys. you don’t have mixed in key yet, you better get it soon or you will get left in the dust! It will change your DJ life forever.
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Endo is a DJ and product specialist for Native Instruments and lives in Brooklyn. Listen to mixes from him atwww.djendo.com.
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