Camelot wheel

The Camelot wheel is a way of naming keys built for the booth. Every key gets a number from 1 to 12 and a letter: A for minor, B for major. A minor is 8A, C major is 8B. Twenty-four positions in all, laid out in a circle.

The point of it is that it replaces musical knowledge with code reading: you do not need to know what a fifth is to see that two tracks sit close together. It is the notation Mixed In Key, Rekordbox and most DJ software use, so in practice it is the common language.

A warning belongs here. For years the rule taught alongside the wheel was "stay put, go to the relative, or move one hour". That is a simplification, and a narrower one than it should be: it leaves out moves that sound perfectly good. In September 2026 we adopted a transition table from a DJ who sent us his reference file, and it replaces that distance heuristic. Our wheel and our checker read from that table, not from the one-hour rule.

If two tools give you different verdicts on the same pair of tracks, they are probably using different rules rather than one of them being broken.