How to plan a DJ set

A set plan is the order of your tracks, their keys and tempos, and one full playback of the set before you head to the gig. The room does not care about the crate you meant to play. It cares about what comes out of the speakers, in sequence.

Sonata is a set planner that runs in the browser. You pick the tracks. It reads the key and the tempo, suggests an order, flags the pairs that clash, and plays the set so you can hear it. You can throw the suggestion out. You still do the djing.

Decide the job of the set

Before the order, decide the job. An opening hour and a peak hour are different sets, even from the same crate.

Write down three things:

• How long you are playing.
• Where in the night it sits: opening, middle, or peak.
• The last feeling you want in the room.

Then pull more tracks than you need, from files you have the right to play. MP3, WAV, AIFF or FLAC from your own library all work, and a folder is fine on a computer. Give yourself room to cut. A 60 minute set is happier if you started with 75 minutes and removed the tracks that did not earn a place.

Order the keys with the Camelot wheel

Sonata shows keys as Camelot codes. 8A is A minor. 8B is C major. The number is the position on the wheel, A is the minor ring and B is the major ring. The Camelot wheel maps all 24 codes to musical keys.

Two tracks get the label In key when they are:

• the same code, such as 8A into 8A
• one step either way on the same ring, such as 8A into 7A or 9A
• the relative major or minor, the same number on the other ring, such as 8A into 8B

Anything else is a key clash. That includes two steps around the wheel, and a diagonal step onto the other ring. Sonata uses those two labels only: In key, and Key clash. A track whose key could not be read gets no label, and it is not treated as a clash.

The Camelot key checker answers this for any pair. Each code also has its own page, for example 8A.

The energy boost, +2 and +7

Moving one step up the wheel, 8A to 9A, is a perfect fifth, seven semitones. That move is already In key, and it is the usual way to lift the room a little.

The move DJs call an energy boost is two steps up the wheel, +2. 8A goes to 10A, A minor to B minor, a whole tone higher. It can feel like a gear change. It is not a smooth harmonic match, and Sonata flags it as a key clash. Use it when you want that lift and you have heard it, not as a default.

+7 is the other number people pass around, and it means two different things:

• Seven semitones is the perfect fifth. On this wheel that is the +1 step, the In key move above. It is not a second kind of boost.
• Seven Camelot numbers, 8A to 3A, is only one semitone between the tonics. That is a clash, and it does not behave like a boost. If a note says "+7" and does not say semitones, check which one it means before you commit the mix.

Sonata never transposes a track to hide a clash. Every song plays in the key it was written in, and a clash stays on screen.

The suggested order puts the fewest clashes first, then a steadier tempo. It is a suggestion. Drag a track and the order is yours. Arrange by key puts the suggestion back, and that control only shows while the order is still automatic.

Let the tempo move slowly

Tempo is measured from the audio. A tempo written in the file's tags only helps settle half time or double time. It is not used on its own. If Serato is showing about half or about double the tempo you count, correct that reading before you trust a climb. The steps are in Why is my Serato BPM wrong.

You can set one tempo for the whole set, from 60 to 200 BPM, or leave every track at its own. A track follows the set tempo when its beat reads clearly and its own tempo is within 10 percent, counted straight or at half or double time. The rest keep their own tempo, and the transition says it could not be synced.

Inside a blend, key lock stays on. The track keeps its pitch. Time stretches, the key does not.

Plan the BPM like a walk, not a lift. A run of 120, 122, 124 is easier to mix than 118 straight into 132. Big jumps belong at the ends of the order, or in a place where you are happy to echo out rather than ride a long blend. Pairs that cannot be beatmatched are pushed toward the ends of a suggested order for that reason.

Shape the energy, then ignore the shape when your ears disagree

A useful shape for a lot of openings is simple. Start lower, let it climb, leave yourself one breather, and decide the peak on purpose. New sets in Sonata take a warm-up shape quietly. There is no control for it. Tempo weighs more than that shape, so the suggestion will not yank the BPM around just to draw a pretty arc.

The shape is a preference, not a promise. Sections you might mark for yourself:

• Opening: lower energy and easy keys, so you can look at the room.
• Build: small steps up in tempo, keys moving one step at a time.
• Peak: the tracks you actually came to play. Leave space between them. Two anthems back to back often waste the second one.
• Breather: one track that drops the energy without dumping the key. The relative major or minor is useful here.
• Close: know your last track before you leave. The last five minutes are a bad time to invent an ending.

If the suggestion's shape fights the night you are playing, reorder it. The tool does not know the room.

Hear the blends before you play them

Reading 8A to 9A is not the same as hearing it. Play the set through once, at a volume where a clash is obvious.

The default blend is 32 bars, and it gets shorter only when the tracks do not have that much room. You can pick another length on a single transition. In that long blend the beats stay locked, the new track comes in with its bass cut, and the bass hands over so two full basslines are not playing at once.

Two limits are worth knowing before you trust a green label:

• A pair that is too far apart in tempo, or whose beat did not read clearly, does not get that blend. It gets an echo out, or a plain fade. Two beats that cannot lock should not play over each other.
• A key clash is still mixed if you leave the tracks side by side. Once you have taken over the order, the label does not reorder them for you. Listen to that transition on its own. Shorter is usually kinder.

The set overview is drawn from the real audio, so intros, breakdowns and drops show up as different heights. Use that to see whether you have three breakdowns in a row.

Check the export before you are in the booth

The mix is made in your browser and saved as a download.

Export the whole set as one file when that is what you will play: WAV at 16-bit, 44.1 kHz stereo, or MP3 at 320 kbps, 44.1 kHz stereo. A WAV holds about six hours. Longer than that, use MP3.

Free is one mix of up to 10 tracks, with WAV export while the set stays inside that cap. MP3, a rekordbox playlist, rekordbox XML, and USB tracks are part of Pro. A Weekend Pass is Pro for 48 hours, from 5 US dollars.

For a Pioneer deck, export to USB writes the mix as one file plus a tracklist. The same WAV and MP3 rules apply. That mix file does not write cues or a beatgrid.

USB tracks, marked beta and on Pro, writes each track as its own file with BPM, key and the mix-in and mix-out cues, into a legacy Pioneer library. It does not write the newest players' library, and it has not been tried on every deck. Use an empty stick. If a library is already there, nothing is written. Sonata does not delete anything on the stick.

rekordbox can take a playlist in set order, or an XML file that includes the mix cues. Both are part of Pro. The playlist itself does not carry cues.

SoundCloud, if you want the mix up later, is three steps you do yourself: download the mix, copy the tracklist, open SoundCloud. Sonata does not send the file.

Before you pack the stick:

• Play the file once, start to finish, or at least every transition you were unsure about.
• Read the tracklist against the order you meant. A title goes missing when the tags are empty.
• Check the stick on the gear you will use if you can. A file that plays on a laptop can still be the wrong format for a deck.
• Keep the original tracks with you as well. The export is a convenience, not the only copy.

Then go and play it

A plan is a head start, not a script. If the room wants a different third track, play the different third track. The point of hearing the set at home is that you already know how the keys sit and where the blends are long, so a change on the night is a choice and not a guess.

Hear your whole set before the gig. The first mix is free, up to 10 tracks.