Alex et al, On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 06:30:53AM -0700, Alex Constantin wrote: > 1) Key Detection : > > Here's my view of harmonic mixing : > > - From my experience, whilst live-mixing for a crowd, you've got to keep a > steady, healthy vibe, or else you'll get "The Look". The Look is where those > particular individuals that have been banging their heads all night to your > sounds, gradually stop, take a deep breath, and throw you a gaze, as if they' > re trying to say "Pity, you almost got on my-favorites list..." <- And that > is, in my opinion, the most horrible thing a DJ has to endure...the > disappointment of listeners.
That's all true, but I don't see what it has to do with harmonic mixing! Ok, this is not aimed at Alex but I'm throwing it out there for argument/discussion on the list: I'm afraid I think the current "fad" for key-matching is overblown. IMO any DJ worth his or her salt gets to know which tunes go together by a combination of practice and instinct. That they should be close in BPM is a given if you're beatmatching, but I don't think that the same applies to key; in fact I think that knowing the keys of two tunes is an exceptionally poor indicator of whether they will "go together", and the trend for using things like Mixed In Key to actually *change* the key of tracks and make everything homogenous is my idea of a nightmare as it makes sets unbelievably boring. It ignores the fact that different keys engender different feelings, and a good DJ set should explore a variety of these, not just loop around the same one all night... Ok, so that's my opinion, others differ and that's up to them. But... > I see the real challenge as being, not to devise a PDA, as this would be > *relatively* straight forward given Mixxx's already existing bmp detection > algorithm (which, shamefully I must admit, I didn't get to look at yet, "mi > scuzi"), BUT to distinguish the concepts of frequency from velocity, & > "Adding a new button to Mixxx's interface" (actually 3 of them), one saying > "harmonic" & two knobs (one for each channel) to change acuteness or gravity > of tones -> just like this lil' guy can : > http://www.djresource.eu/Topics/story/99/Pioneer-DJM-800/ (keyword "harmonic") ... as an owner of the DJM-800, I can tell you now that even if I was into "harmonic mixing", the Harmonic function on this mixer is absolute rubbish. It is of no practical use whatsoever: it mangles the sound of any track which has a beat, and even if only used on beatless tracks, it tends to "float" and not be able to lock on to the pitch it's supposed to be on. I very occasionally use it for a kooky effect, but the idea it could be used seriously for harmonic mixing is laughable. Pioneer are traditionally very good at DSP algorithms (their BPM detection is still the best in the world after about 10 years) so the fact that this realtime harmonic alteration sucks so much strongly suggests this is not a function that should be attempted in realtime. Mixed In Key and ilk, AIUI, work a bit better because they can analyse a whole track in one go, which gives a much more accurate analysis of the pitch, and then take their time over transposing it using a very fine quality adaptive algorithm. I think anyone who wants to do harmonic mixing would be better off preparing their tracks in a separate program like this (or even better off just getting to know their tunes and developing their instinct...). I just don't believe mixxx could do this job well enough to be useful. > Also to be noted -> pitch, in itself, is not enough. You (or I, if I get > accepted :D) have to develop a means to change the tempo of the track without > changing its pitch, or else one could end-up getting a ragga - junglist MC > voice to sound like the tooth fairy on steroids, if pitch variations between > songs exceed, say +2.50%, just to get 'em into beat. Well we already have pitch-independent time stretch, although I personally would like it to be switchable via independent buttons on the GUI for each channel instead of locked inside the Prefs. Ben ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Mixxx-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mixxx-devel
