Finding the Rhythm

Many DJs these days have discovered the effectiveness of harmonic mixing: making sure that the track you’re mixing out of is harmonically compatible with the one you’re mixing into.

Most DJs I know don’t know jack about music, or more specifically, music theory. (For that matter, most composers of electronic music that I know don’t know jack about music.) For the most part, it’s not really necessary. We’ve all been around music long enough to know, by ear alone, what works and what doesn’t, and our love of music means we’re tuned-in to start with.

In any case, when you really pay attention to what works harmonically, one’s sets improve. But some transitions are harder than others, due to the fact that there aren’t many songs in particular keys you might otherwise need to pick from. I decided to go about counting the number of songs I have in each key, and the results were interesting.

To start with, as is typical of popular music, the vast majority of songs are in minor keys. So there’s a split. In fact, 88% of the songs in my collection are in minor keys; only 12% are in major ones.

The most popular key—by a lot, actually—is A minor. Not a huge surprise, given that on a keyboard, A minor can be played solely on the white keys (none of those scary black ones).    Surprisingly, among major keys, F and G are tied for first place—each with a single black key in-use—not C, which also uses solely the white keys.

The rarest of the minor keys is A flat minor. This isn’t a surprise either, really, since every single note in the scale is flatted, and the only white keys you use are C flat and F flat. The rarest key period is F#, which largely has the reverse problem (everything but B is sharped).

You’d have to be a bit of a music geek to even understand this post, or actually, to particularly care about it. But I thought it was interesting to observe what was going on.

One of the reasons I find this fascinating is to see what if any difference there might be in whether a track gets played based on its key. If A flat minor is the rarest key, and a DJ needs to mix into A flat minor to maintain an energetic mix (harmonics and energy mixing are beyond the scope of this particular blog post), then would songs in that key get played more often—and/or are they more likely to get played in the first place? I don’t know the answer, but I will say that tends to be the case for me in those situations where I’m actively trying to build energy through harmonic choices.

Maybe if I’m really bored someday, I’ll start tracking the keys of songs that show-up in DJ charts and see if any patterns emerge. Or maybe I’ll leave the music geekdom to someone else. 

Wes