"We refuse to imitate anyone else." - An Interview with Yakov Vorobyev, Mixed In Key's Founder

The Mixed In Key founder reflects on building groundbreaking DJ software, partnering with zplane, and the future of AI-assisted music production.

When Mixed In Key launched nearly two decades ago, harmonic mixing was still a niche concept. Today, the company is synonymous with intelligent tools for DJs and music producers, helping millions of artists analyse tracks, discover musical ideas and streamline their creative workflows.

In this interview, Mixed In Key founder Yakov Vorobyev reflects on the company's origins, how licensing zplane's key detection technology helped turn an ambitious idea into a working product, and the growing role of AI in music production.

Please could you introduce yourself, Mixed In Key, and what exactly you do there

I'm the founder and the inventor of Mixed In Key. I started this project in 2006, and we just turned 20 years old. It's been an amazing journey with no boring days! What has made it fun all these years is a unique policy we have, which is that we refuse to imitate anyone else.

Every single product that we’ve made was the first of its kind. We always aim to be at the frontier of music technology, and we always invent new concepts before somebody else does.

As a DJ yourself, the original idea for Mixed In Key stemmed from a very real problem you were facing – that you needed to automate the process of key labelling of your tracks. What part of your background gave you the experience required to develop a product like Mixed In Key?

I was working for Bethesda Softworks, the video game company known for Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Doom, to name a few. It was here that I met Pete Hines, the Senior Vice President of Global Marketing. 

I was only 17 when I joined the company, and Pete took me under his wing and became one of many excellent mentors I had over the years. It was so useful to see what the job was about and how he worked – I learnt how a professional organization manages so many projects and people.

Other mentors include Mark Davis, the inventor of the Camelot Wheel. He had already invented it in the early 1990s, but it wasn’t well known yet. With Mixed In Key, we took the Camelot Wheel and combined it with an educational approach. This became the harmonic mixing framework that so many DJs use today.

And you were a DJ long before developing Mixed In Key. Who were your musical influences in the DJ world?

In 1996, a Norwegian DJ called DJ Prince made a website to teach people how to mix harmonically. His and Mark Davis’ websites were the only two resources available at this point. When I started DJing in 2001, their websites had a huge effect on my DJing.

When I invented Mixed In Key, I had about 14 years of software development experience and five years of DJ experience. Combining my two passions with the advice I got from my mentors made it much easier to create a useful product. And of course, a huge thanks to my dad, who was a wonderful software developer and gave me lots of time and advice.

Which zplane SDK did you license to build early versions of the product?

zplane played a huge role in Mixed In Key's history and the world of DJs in general. In 2005, there was no key detection software in existence. Even though I wanted to automate key detection for my Mixed In Key product, there was absolutely no way that I could build a key detector on my own. There were no published books, no scientific papers, and no open-source code that could do it, and certainly no LLMs like ChatGPT that could help.

zplane had a tiny Windows demo on their website that could analyze one file at a time. I thought the tech was cool so I emailed to ask if I could license it. I was the first person ever to contact them about licensing. We made a deal, and zplane became the foundation of the first version of Mixed In Key 1.0. It wasn’t long before I started improving the code and submitting feature requests.

Version 2.0 of Mixed In Key then used its own key detection, but without zplane’s initial trust in me, Mixed In Key wouldn’t exist. The technology enabled me to build a prototype that performed way better than I expected.

How easy was the SDK to implement?

It required some C++ knowledge, which wasn’t my strongest skill. I went on a website called Rent-A-Coder and posted a job listing. Two guys responded, saying that they would be interested in helping out as a side project.

This became an amazing working relationship, and almost 20 years later, both of those guys are still on my team and are responsible for some excellent software code. That code features in a series of great products that musicians love to use.

What kind of challenges did you face in the initial phases of product development?

When you're at the frontier of something, and nobody understands what you're trying to build, you really must educate people about how the software works and what it's supposed to do. The first five years of Mixed In Key were dedicated to education.

David Guetta, Sasha and John Digweed, Deep Dish, Pete Tong, Kaskade, and many other artists discovered Mixed In Key super early. In the first year, I had great testimonials from artists I’ve always looked up to. They became my mentors, and gave me feedback on what could be done better. By always learning from them and figuring out how to fit into their workflows, we were able to make the software better with every release.

Did sourcing third-party algorithms like our own help you overcome those challenges?

Of course! Licensing zplane’s algorithms was a huge time-saver for us. It gave us back time to focus on UX and UI and not build everything from scratch. Not only did it help us back then, but our products still use zplane algorithms today. We love the time-stretching algorithm, ELASTIQUE. It’s the industry standard, and it sounds so good! All the professional software uses it.

Your product offering has grown over the years, and has evolved to include tools for music producers as well as DJs. Was that always part of Mixed In Key’s long-term plan, or did you identify more problems in that area and start to develop the products that solved them?

There was a moment in 2013 when we were trying to integrate Mixed In Key better with Pioneer DJ's software. Integration just wasn't going as smoothly as we wanted, and at some point, we realized that if we only made DJ products, we would be at the mercy of companies like Pioneer. If they wanted to have a walled garden and not let us in, there was nothing we could do about it.

Our first product for music producers came out of both a passion for making music, and frustration with how controlled the DJ market was. There was total freedom in building music plugins because every DAW and the VST/AU framework allowed us to do whatever we wanted. We developed Captain Plugins because we wanted to help producers write great chords, basslines, and melodies.

It made music production a lot more fun, and it gave us something new to be excited about. Captain Plugins is nearly 10 years old, and we're super excited about what the future of that platform is going to look like.

Which other zplane algorithms have you incorporated across your product range?

We have always spoken highly of every single zplane algorithm, and have recommended them to our friends. Our go-to suggestions are ELASTIQUE for time-stretching and AUFTAKT for BPM detection. Both are industry standard, super easy to use, and very effective at what they do.

The use of AI in music is a hot topic these days, but Mixed In Key was ahead of the curve with its intelligent tools that assist artists rather than replace them. How do you see AI’s place in music changing over the coming years?

My biggest concern is that it's going to be even harder for musicians to make money. Most of my friends are musicians or creatives, and I see it firsthand. There aren't enough high-paying gigs to make up for the loss of revenue they could get from music licensing. Sync companies are now paying less. Revenue from other sources, like DJ gigs, has not increased.

How does a musician make money nowadays besides getting a day job somewhere else? I have no answer to that, but I am very concerned for my friends who work in the music industry because things are changing faster than we can adapt.

Thankfully, zplane algorithms are clearly on the side of good. They help musicians and software developers express good ideas. They aren't automating tasks that humans are doing right now. I think zplane and Mixed In Key are closely aligned in our missions to make useful tools without putting humans out of business.

Are there any skills or traits of a great artist that you don’t think can be replaced by AI, or technology in general?

Someone said that when you follow an artist, you follow their history and their personality. When you listen to their music, you're listening to their life story. AI cannot replicate that because it doesn't have a life story.

In my personal experience, when I travel to places like Nashville, Tennessee, I'm always inspired by the local artists I meet there. They are as authentic as it gets. I hope that the music industry promotes and emphasizes music made by real humans with a story to tell because we want to hear more of that. I’m not interested in listening to AI-generated music. I want to see the artist perform live.

20 years is a long time for any technology-based business to remain successful. How have you maintained your position at the forefront of this type of product?

We never got complacent, and we always innovated by being the first of our kind. Our users appreciate the love and care we put into our software, and they buy it because they understand that it's something special.

Many musicians hate subscription software, but every Mixed In Key product is a one-time purchase. It’s much easier for musicians to appreciate what we do because we're not milking them for money every month like huge corporations. Being a small, independent company gives us superpowers in that regard.

What’s next for Mixed In Key? Any upcoming product updates?

We just released a new version of Wingman, which is the best plugin for making remixes and producing original music. It's a plug-in you can add to any channel in your DAW. It will listen to the audio input that you can capture on that channel, and it'll suggest chords and bass lines that fit perfectly over that input.

When you give it a Vocal, it’ll instantly show you great chords that sound really good with it. Every chord is customizable and you can edit everything. I spent almost a year building the most comfortable user experience for editing chords. We already had 10 years of feedback from Captain Chords to help us make Wingman the best new plugin.

It made Wingman easy to understand and easy to use. It also became a huge hit for us. Artists I haven’t talked to in 10 years have been emailing me and asking me if they could get a license. We got testimonials from Diplo, MK, Karra, Flosstradamus, Reid Stefan, Gui Boratto, and many more. It’s rare for a new plugin to get traction, so we’re very thankful to the artists who are using it.

I’ve seen Wingman show up in unexpected workflows – there are people in Bollywood using it for Indian film scores, and more. It’s a super useful plugin for anyone working in any DAW, and we’re building next-gen versions of it now. Our fans keep giving us feedback on what to do next, and we are listening to them closely.

Any new products you’re working on?

We have one more major launch this year – it’s going to be for music producers, and the new plugin will be the first of its kind too. It’s fun making frontier technology for creative people.

From a business and product development perspective, what advice would you give to a creative with an idea for a product?

Building commercially successful software is very hard, but being a hobbyist could make it a lot easier. You don't necessarily have to quit your day job to start a new project. Just use your evenings and weekends, and if it goes really well, you'll know that it's time to go full-time.

I still had a day job when I started Mixed In Key, and it gave me a chance to ease into the role of a full-time music technology developer. Not every product we’ve launched has become a major success, but you know you have a good idea when you start to see some promising sales figures and generate traction with users. It takes a bit of luck, an amazing team, lots of labor, and long days to create something that people really care about.

Anything else you’d like to discuss?

Seriously, thank you to zplane for helping us on day one of Mixed In Key. We wouldn’t be here without you guys, and It's really cool to know that both companies have been in business for 20-plus years doing what we love. We wish you lots of success. You make the world of music better!

Thank you to Yakov for his kind words about our audio technology, and for speaking with us today. You can keep up with Mixed In Key via their website, YouTube, and Instagram pages.