What method MIK “Energy” tag or BPM is better to choose Warmup or Main Song.
Q. Which method will produce the best choice of selecting song for warm/cold down or main, MixedInKey “energy” tag or by BPM.
I have one of my first Gig which will be outside of doing some thing for friends or family members. I really find building playlist kind of hard because I can never feel sure if I’m picking the right tune for the moment. I normally go by what I see people is feeling at the moment. For this particular Gig there will be at least 2 or 3 hours in which I have to play kind of back ground music, and then later on play for social dancing. The gig is mainly for latin people just in case this will help some one give me some tips.
Hi,
i suggest you to rate your Songs ( from 1 to 5 stars ) to describe the amount of energy for each Song. 1 star means warmup , 5 stars means Fire, mid-range energy 3 Stars , and so on… i don’t use this méthode , but it will work well in my opinion.
personally , i go by track rating, comments and the knowledge of my collection.
good luck.
Edit : and yea , don’t trust MIK , use your feeling.
Completely agree with energy part, completely disagree with MIK part.
For me it’s trust MIK 100% , cus it’s pretty damn good at recognizing keys and some people (me included) are very sensible to wrong keys being played together.
I use energy tags to indicate where in a night/set I THINK I would be likely play it, I only use it as a rough indication tho and don’t base my track selection on it in a rigid manner
I have had several tracks that where in the same key(MIK analyzed) that sounded awfully together . So its a rule of thumb and not a definition.
The force needs to be used wisely ! the only thing you can really trust are your ears !
That said, i do the same choch, rate the tracks in energy besides knowing your music it can help you keeping the vibe there where you want it.
I use traktor’s open key notation now as a “suggestion” to help me put some groove together but my sets jump up by 6-8 bpm as well so for me the “energy” is more important. also, psytrance
I don’t know about that. I don’t particularly spin those two genres - but for pretty much everything else I’ve had really good luck with it. I mainly spin breaks and DnB. Sometimes I’ll play bass heavy house (“future” whatever, UK Jackin, fidget) and it works well in that. I haven’t run into an instance where mixing harmonically hasn’t been useful.
Specifically i mean tracks with pretty much beats & percussion at the start and end, as soon as melodic elements are introduced, thats when the harmonics come into play.
None of the above, intuition is the only helpful thing. “Energy level” of a track is certainly context-dependent and key just isn’t relevant that much. All you guys should give playing vinyl a try, might broaden your horizon.
you can trust MiK for improvised mixing, as long as you actually listen to the songs first ,together in the monitors and confirm that you can work the mix out. you do NOT need to mix in key tho, and certainly not ALL the time. i like to focus(close me eyes) on the song and try to see if another song pops out in my mind first before i start scrolling through my collection. alternately, if you cant seem to find a song that works nicely in MiK you can do some kind of creative FX transition, OR my personal favorite , use a drum loop to create a break, and then mix that.
