Paste your tracklist, one track per line. Each track is matched against a corpus of 70,000 published DJ sets to recover its tempo and key, and every transition is then graded by the same evaluator MixReady runs on a set it builds: the technique it wants, the key relationship, the tempo move, and how many real sets have played that exact pair. It grades what a tracklist can show. It says plainly what it cannot.
A tracklist is mostly titles, and titles carry no tempo or key. So the first thing the grader does is look each line up in a corpus of more than 70,000 published DJ sets — the same index behind What plays next — by title and artist. A match supplies the track's BPM and Camelot key from the graph and unlocks the third column below. A line the corpus does not know keeps whatever tempo and key you pasted; a line with neither is still counted as a track, and its transitions are reported as unmeasured rather than guessed. Each row says which it was.
The grading is not a rule of thumb written for this page. Each pair of consecutive tracks is passed to the same evaluator MixReady runs on every transition of a set it builds, and the page prints what the app would: the technique the transition calls for (a standard blend, a bass swap, a cut or tempo-bridge, a filter through the breakdown), the key relationship named in Mixed In Key's vocabulary — perfect match, adjacent on the wheel, relative major/minor, an energy boost, a clash — the tempo move with its pitch percentage, and, when the pair clashes, the smallest key shift that would clear it. Under it all is one number per transition, compatibility from 0 to 1: 60% key, 40% tempo, octave-aware so that 70 into 140 reads as beat-locked, with a real harmonic clash pinned below 0.5 because you can beatmatch a clash but you cannot un-clash it.
Where both tracks matched, the grader looks up how many published sets played that exact ordered pair back to back. A count is the strongest evidence on the page — not that the theory allows the transition, but that DJs have made it. A zero proves nothing, and the row does not pretend it does: most good pairs have never been written down.
The share of your transitions that are in key sits next to the corpus figure of 22%; the share inside a pitch fader next to 66%; your track count against the middle half of real sets, 13 to 27. Read them as context, not targets. A set that is 80% in key is either a very melodic one or a tracklist chosen for the wheel rather than the room.
So read a high score as "the transitions are mechanically easy" and a low one as "here are the transitions to plan" — the rows name the technique each one calls for.
| Flag | The fix |
|---|---|
| Tempo beyond the fader | Do not blend it. Cut on the drop, filter through a breakdown, loop the outgoing track out, or ride an echo tail into the new one. Or move one track so the gap is shared across two transitions. |
| Keys clash, tempo fits | Normal — it is most real transitions. Swap the bass on a phrase boundary, keep the overlap to 8 or 16 bars, and never let both melodic sections play together. |
| Two steps on the wheel | The one move DJs measurably avoid. If the blend is long and melodic, look for a record between them; if it lands on a drop, it will pass. |
| Over 3 BPM, inside the fader | Blendable, but keylock on: matched without it, the incoming track sits up to a semitone off the one still playing, and the key you planned is not the key you get. |
The parser is forgiving on purpose. Everything that is not a tempo or a key becomes the label the corpus is searched with. It reads the first plausible tempo on each line — a number between 60 and 200, with or without "BPM" — and the first key, either as a Camelot code (8A, 11B) or a musical name (A minor, Am, F# maj, Dbm). Everything else on the line becomes the label. Open Key notation (1m, 8d) is read too. Lines with neither a tempo nor a key are kept as tracks, so the count is right, and marked unmeasured. Copying rows out of rekordbox, Serato, Traktor, Mixed In Key, a 1001tracklists page or a spreadsheet all works. A match is only taken when it shares a real word with your line and does not contradict a tempo you gave, so a wrong track is far less likely than no track.
Three things a tracklist can show before you hear it: every tempo move sits inside what a pitch fader can hold, so the transitions can actually be blended; the long overlaps are in compatible keys, so melodies agree while both tracks are audible; and the track count fits the slot, which for most sets means 13 to 27 records. What the paper cannot show is energy and arrangement, which is where the set is won or lost.
Fewer than you have been told. Across 200,000 transitions from published DJ sets, 22% were Camelot-compatible against 16.7% by chance. Professionals take key into account and then, four times in five, play something else. Aim for compatible keys on the long melodic blends and ignore it for cuts, bass swaps and breakdown transitions.
No, but it is a different move. Past about 6% of the current tempo you have run out of pitch fader, so the transition cannot be a blend: it has to be a cut on a drop, a filter through a breakdown, a loop-out or an echo tail. A third of real transitions are outside the fader. The mistake is trying to blend across the gap, not the gap itself.
How to plan a DJ set · Energy arc planner · Will these two songs mix? · How many tracks in a set? · Six transitions, and when to use each
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