Key Shift Visualiser
A pitch-shifted track is a harmonic coin-flip: nudge it the wrong way and your beautiful drop turns into a sour wall of sound. This visualiser lays every semitone shift across a piano-roll so you can see exactly which notes move, name the interval in plain English, and pick a substitution chord that keeps the groove inside the same key family. Use it before you lock a master to play back 2 BPM faster, or to plan a riser that walks up a fourth into the breakdown.
Inputs
Piano-roll
Each white key shows the note name. The cyan bar is the note you start on; the fuchsia bar is the note you land on after the shift. For shifts inside ±6 semitones the two are physically close on the roll; for ±7–12 they wrap around the octave.
How to use
- Pick the Original key from the dropdown — pick the key the track is actually written in, not the key Rekordbox guesses.
- Pick the Target key you want to land on after pitch-shifting (or just drag the semitone slider).
- Read the Interval chip in plain English (e.g. +5 st = perfect 4th up) and the Diatonic substitution line.
- Look at the piano-roll — if the cyan and fuchsia bars sit next to each other, the shift is in-key. If they jump a tritone or a 7th, the shift will sound dissonant against the rest of the mix.
- Commit the pitch shift in your DAW or DJ software only when the interval and the substitution both make sense for your track.
How to read the result
The piano-roll draws all 12 chromatic notes left-to-right, wrapping at the octave. The original key lights up cyan; the target lights up fuchsia. The number of notes between them is your semitone count. The named interval tells you what that distance feels like to a listener.
Shifts of ±1 or ±2 semitones are modal interchange territory: the track keeps most of its colour, you just borrow a chord from a parallel mode (e.g. C major → D Dorian). Shifts of ±3, ±4 or ±5 sit inside the key family if you also change the tonal centre (relative/parallel mix). Shifts of ±6 (tritone) or ±7 are the dramatic ones — they usually belong to a lift into a breakdown or a key change at the drop, not a continuous playback shift.
The Diatonic substitution chip suggests a chord you can re-purpose inside your existing arrangement so the shift sounds intentional. For example, a +4 shift from A minor lands on C major, and you can revoice the chord progression as Am → F → C → G to keep the same harmonic function.
Limitations
This tool models equal temperament at A4 = 440 Hz. Most acoustic instruments and many vocal-led tracks are not tuned exactly to equal temperament, so a "+0" interval between, say, a recorded cello and a synth pad can still beat against each other. If your ears tell you the shift is wrong even though the maths says it's in-key, trust your ears.
The piano-roll is a 1-octave view of the chromatic scale. Real shifts move notes across the whole keyboard — a +12 semitone shift of every chord doesn't just transpose by an octave, it also shifts the voicing up an octave which can leave a hole in the low end. Plan bass and sub separately.
It does not analyse audio. If you don't know what key your track is in, use a key-detection tool first (Mixed In Key, Rekordbox analysis, or a spectrogram-based check). Garbage in, garbage out.
The diatonic substitution suggestions assume a standard major/minor tonal framework. For modal, atonal or microtonal music the substitutions will be misleading.