Quote Originally Posted by keithace View Post
you are letting a piece of software dictate what you play next. That should NEVER happen. You are the one in charge. You are the one dictating the flow.

You are using harmonic mixing as a short cut. There are no short cuts. (other than the sync button). Learn your music. Play often. Listen to what sounds good together. Make notes. Train your ears. If you are a musician then you have no need for the software.

PS: alot of us, including myself, come from classic music backgrounds. Some of us played in bands. So don't think that you are the only one.
I don't know if I'd go that far. If I'm playing a song in the key of C minor, I can play anything in C minor, F minor, G minor, or E flat major. That's a lot of music right there, and picking which song out of all of those to play would be under the category of song selection. Of course you're right that you should try every track on its own rather than using the computer (and surely no one mixes live without having practiced the songs), but in my case, I have these two songs that I really want to play together and they're a tritone apart! All I'd need to do is transpose one of them a half step, but whenever I do, it messes up the sound of the bass drum. I actually found a freeware pitch shifter program that's really good and worked well for one or two songs but it did the same thing to this track. It makes it sound like the bass drum was getting hit twice. So I've decided to give up changing the keys. I'll just follow all of your advice. For songs that aren't in the right key, I'm just going to have to mix during the long intros/outtros.