DJing using Harmonic Mixing using Serato can be confusing.

There are plenty of ways to setup your workflow for DJing using Harmonic Mixing.  I wanted to be able to sort my music by both BPM and Song Key at the same time but actually found it was quite difficult to do that in Serato.  After a few attempts, I found a way to break down my music to be able to quickly find tracks on the fly that are of the same bpm that can be harmonically mixed using Smart Crates.

Harmonic Mixing:

I have heard many debates when it comes to Harmonic Mixing.  A lot of old school DJs preach the gospel of doing everything by ear.  Having come up on Turntables and Vinyl, I agree that it is very important to be able to hear in your head what will sound good but I also try to embrace technology to help improve my mixing.  The truth is, you should do what works for you and don’t worry what others think.

Harmonic mixing helps ensure that your song transitions won’t clash by matching up song keys that are harmonically compatible and by letting you easily be able to read what songs should mix well together.  There are a few different software to do this for you.  While some are free, I decided to purchase Mixed in key a long time ago because it was the easiest user interface to understand at the time and their camelot system made sense to me.  The camelot system is like reading a clock.  You start at 12 o clock at the top.  12 can mix with 1 or 11 since they are next to it.  1 can mix with 12 and 2, etc.  You can also mix 12A into 12B but you probably wouldn’t want to mix 12B into 1A.

EDIT: nowenknows on reddit let me know that you can also mix +/- 3 spaces from the different letters.  If you’re going from A->B the number should go up (clockwise). If you’re going B->A number should go down (counterclockwise).  For example, You could mix from 3A to 6B or 6B to 3A but you wouldn’t go from 6A to 3B, you could only go from 6A to 9B.   But like anything in music or art, this is not a rule, it just has a reason behind it. Numbers and letters are great but is no match for a good ear.

This being said, these aren’t hard rules and this is where knowing your music and being able to hear the mix in your head does really help.

So every time I purchase a new song, the first thing I do is open up MIK, import the song and then analyze them.  This sets the songs Key, Tempo (more on this next) and Energy level which can then be accessed in Serato.  I then quit MiK and open up Serato.

Analyzing Files:

I don’t know why, but I have always counted out beats a lot slower than some.  When I first got into dubstep, I found it easiest to count it out at 70 BPM instead of 140.  So when I load up Serato, I like to set the new music’s BPM to a range of 58-115.  This helps me be able to setup my workflow using the least amount of Smart Crates (more on this next).  So select the range that works for you and click analyze.  You can also drag individual tracks on to the Analyze button to just do a specific song.

Now in Serato,  you will want to ensure that the BPM (Beats per minute), KEY (The key your song is in) and GROUPING (Energy Level) categories are added.  You can do this with the arrow button on the right hand side of where your music is in Serato.

You should then be able to sort your music by BPM and Key which is super helpful… but we aren’t done just yet.  Next we are going to work with Serato’s Smart Crates which will make selecting songs on the fly super fast and easy.

Smart Crates:

Serato lets your pragmatically sort your music using Smart Crates.  You can set the parameters that you want such as Key, BPM, Genre, Date added and more and it will constantly update the music that is inside of the crate.

I wanted to be able to easily sort my music by the Camelot system and BPM at the same time, so I created some smart crates that put all the same keyed songs and a range of BPMs together.  Because I set the BPM range from 58-115, I used 58-75 BPM, 76-90 BPM and 91+.  I decided between these ranges because if I pitch up a 58 BPM song to the +8% level and pitch down a 75 BPM song by -8% on the turntables, they usually are level out so that they can be beat matched.  Setting these up takes a little bit to setup and you will want to adjust the BPM ranges based on the BPM range you choose.

Below are the rules for how to setup the smart crates from scratch.  For 1A, 1B, 2A and 2B you need to set them up with a few more rules so that they don’t include 10A/B, 11A/B and 12A/B.

For 3A/B – 12A/B you can use  a bit shorter rules as seen below:

Results and how to use it:

Once you have setup all the smart crates, you will then be able to click on each crate and sort the music by BPM.  Since you have the BPMs in a range and by key, you can now easily see which songs will mix with the current song you are playing and be able to easily find music that is close to the same BPM with the click of a Smart Crate.

This totally transformed my workflow to picking out songs that I wanted to play at a gig and throwing them into a crate to being able to choose the next track on the fly.  It has made making live mashups easier as well.

Download: 

Because it can take some time to setup your Serato Smart Crates, I decided to make them downloadable for you to use if you like this workflow.  To install them, download the SmartCrate Zip File and unzip them into your Serato Smart Crate folder.  Mine is located in Music/_Serato_/SmartCrates

Once unzipped you should be able to load up Serato and the Smart Crates should be ready to go.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/1h6c0lva00v206q/SmartCrates.zip

If this has helped you at all, I would appreciate it if you follow me on SoundCloud:

http://www.soundcloud.com/casiocopilot