I'll give you a little background as to why I'm asking this question: earlier this month i was going out with a buddy of mine for his bday, when i got to his house i found out he had a few other friends over one of which brought his DJ gear. Cool. Turns out he has been DJing for like 10 years and is doing a good job of it at the house.
Skip to the end of the night and for reasons which i won't get in to i'm now on the couch feeling kind of sick :P So my buddy decides to hop on the decks and with essentially little knowledge of Traktor is mixing up a storm with 0 problems of clashing keys. I can't move from the couch to get up and look but I'm thinking "ok, wtf? either all the songs the DJ friend has are in the same key or i'm missing something" So he's going at it for a good long while before another guy hops on, same result, again "wtf?" Finally a random girl decides to try it out and again same result. Now I'm actually rather annoyed cuz this is just way too easy. It takes me weeks to get just the right songs for a given mix sometimes, and these 3 are doing this all on the fly??
See I'm an Ableton guy, but I did dabble with Traktor when i was just starting and I seemed to recall talk of a function called key lock. With a little Googling turns out this is the case. My question is how many people actually use key lock when they mix? There is always the seemingly monthly thread about using "sync" to beatmatch and how this is clearly cheating blah blah blah, however it strikes me that if a bunch of randoms can hop on the decks and flawlessly harmonic mix, then how is key lock never discussed as being 10'xs worse than sync? I'm not saying it is or isn't "cheating" (my take on that has been if it sounds good, who cares?) but coming from someone who pretty much does every mix harmonically without that function and knowing how brutal that can be sometimes to find songs which fit the mood and actually go together key wise, I'm curious to know how many people are doing this. Is this standard or is it, like sync, a matter of personal preference? Because if 3 people with essentially no knowledge of the songs or Traktor can do it that easily, then I gotta be doing something wrong.
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