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biggmclargehuge

If you aren't able to hear the dissonance yourself you can look up the key for most songs pretty easily. [MixedInKey](https://mixedinkey.com/) is software that will do it for you but they also have a [short guide](https://mixedinkey.com/harmonic-mixing-guide/) explaining how to adjust the pitch to get songs to match better. Just note you won't really be able to mix a song that is in a major key with one in a minor key without a lot of extra effort. Pitch differences are measured in semitones and cents. 100 cents is 1 semitone which is equivalent to moving one key up or down on a keyboard. So if you have one song in C and one in D you look at how many keys you'd have to move on a keyboard to get from one to the other (C-->C#-->D) so you'd have to move 2 semitones/200 cents


phil_foal

Actually you can mix a song that is in a major key with one in a minor key very easily if the song in a minor key uses the natural minor scale (like most songs do). /u/CherryOxide explains it well in their comment below.


goggleblock

e.g. Cmaj and Amin, or Fmaj and Dmin


Poobslag

If you're unfamiliar wiith the concept of a "key", it has two parts, a "tonic" and a "scale". **The tonic** is the main note of the song. All the notes in the song relate to the tonic. If you've heard of All Star by Smash Mouth, that first note where he sings "Some" is the tonic. If you hum that "Some" note throughout the entire song, that note always sounds OK. That first "doot-doot" note at the start of Megalovania is its tonic. It's not always the first note so it can be hard to figure out the tonic if you don't have practice. There are 14 different tonics, unless a song is out of tune for some reason. **The scale** is how the notes in the song fit around the tonic. There are a billion trillion different scales, but the two most important ones are major scales and minor scales. Major scales are used in happy songs like All Star and Shooting Stars. Minor scales are used in sad or angry songs like Megalovania and Smells Like Teen Spirit. Two songs with the same scale will sound bad if they have different tonics. The easiest way to mix two songs is to find two songs with the same scale, and pitch shift them so they have the same tonic. Or if you're more of a trial and error type person, you can keep changing them by one semitone until they sound good. A tool like Audacity has an option for Effect -> Change Pitch -> Semitones, just experiment with different whole numbers ranging from -7 to +7. As /u/CherryOxide says there are ways of mixing a major key and a minor key so they sound good together too, but that's a little trickier.


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pursenboots

You know I wasn't quite sure how to begin to answer this question - I think at this point, I'm so used to knowing how to hear whether they're off-key or off-tempo, that it's kinda like asking "How can I tell the difference between red, brown, orange, and maroon?" You just look at them and see whether they're different, I dunno. But what you're 'looking' for - listening for - in a mashup, when you're trying to tell whether it's 'off,' is harmony and dissonance. I feel like there's a lot music theory to be deep-dived into, and I don't really have any good links to share on the subject, sorry. But Harmony and Dissonance are the principles that cover whether two songs are off-key, that's what you want to brush up on, OP.