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RE: {blog} A Criticism Of Harmonic Mixing
Well the funny thing to me is though that it is such a limited philosophy even if you were going to base song selection on music theory. Simply moving around a half step in either direction or switching from major to minor is ignoring all the other ways chords and keys relate to each other. At the very least, where is the switch to the dominant or sub-dominant key (the 5th or 4th note from the root note, respectively), which would right there introduce WAY more complexity to such a scheme? And which of course is very pleasing to the ear.
100 years later, I reply.
I like the philosophy of this and I get what it is doing, but I think the exhaustive adoption of it to the exclusion of any other selection is really dangerous. Plus you run the risk of music starting to become developed that has this in mind. You get some proper Lego tracks out there. If you had the vinyl, you'd be able to look at the grooves and see "intro, break, build, drop, big impact, break, outro" and just slot tracks in end to end. It sounds good in execution but you completely lose the emotional aspect of things.
I also have another bugbear in over-engineered mixes. I've listened to a few in the last two years where the tracks themselves have been absolutely murdered as the DJ goes to town on them.
Deetron's DJ Kicks from earlier in the year is a bit like that. Starts off with an all time favourite track of mine and it gets absolutely destroyed in the way it is used. Not in the good way. Entire mix struggles to settle on so many fronts.