Playlists and folders tell you where a track lives. They don't tell you what it does to a dancefloor. A good tag taxonomy does — and once it's in place, Lexicon can turn those tags into playlists that build themselves. Here's the eight-dimension system worth standardising on, and how to wire each one into a smartlist.
Set up your tag categories before you tag a thing
In Lexicon, Custom Tags are fully user-defined and live inside categories you control. Create a category like Mood or Set Moment, give it a colour, and drag categories into the order you want. Inside a category you add tags, rename them by double-clicking, delete them via right-click (which removes the tag from every track), and drag tags between categories when you reorganise later.
The matching logic is the part most people miss, and it's what makes the taxonomy below work: on the Custom Tags page you can select tags and click Show tracks, where tags in the same category are OR'd, and tags across different categories are AND'd. So Genre = Techno OR Drum & Bass combined with Vocals = No Vocals does exactly what you'd expect. Design your categories with that behaviour in mind — one category per dimension.
The 8 tags every working DJ should keep
Some of these are Custom Tag categories; a couple are better served by a built-in Lexicon field. Use the right tool for each.
- Energy — Don't reinvent this as a tag. Lexicon has a built-in Energy field, and the Analyzer can fill it by scanning your audio on an absolute scale (chilled material at the low end, harder and faster tracks at the top). You can also pull it from Spotify with Find Tags, or import it from a CSV. Because it's a real numeric field, you can sort and Smartlist on ranges, not just exact matches.
- Vibe / Mood — The dimension a genre name can't capture: Dark, Euphoric, Hypnotic, Funky, Emotional. Make this its own category so several moods can co-exist on one track without fighting your other tags.
- Vocals — Vocal, Instrumental, Acapella intro. A tiny category that saves you mid-set when you need an instrumental to talk over or a clean intro to mix out of.
- Set Moment — Where a track belongs in the arc: Warm-up, Builder, Peak, Closer. This is the category that lets you assemble a night in order instead of by genre.
- Genre & Subgenre — Use Custom Tags for the granularity the single Genre field can't hold — Melodic Techno, Afro House, Garage — so one track can carry both a broad and a narrow label.
- Situation — The room, not the music: Wedding, Club, Festival, Bar, Open-format. Open-format and mobile DJs live and die by this one.
- Setlist Status — Whether a track has been played or needs resting. This is better handled with a built-in flag than a tag: assign a colour or a specific rating to "just played," then recall it with a Smartlist (more on that below). Lexicon's History (under Go → History) records your actual sessions, and you can Save as playlist to capture a set and flag everything in it at once.
- Crate-worthy / Tier — A simple quality flag using the rating field — your A-list versus maybe-later. A Smartlist on rating instantly gives you a "bangers only" view across the whole library.
That's six Custom Tag categories plus two built-in fields (Energy and rating/colour). Keep the list tight — a taxonomy you can actually remember is one you'll actually maintain.
Turn tags into Smartlists that build themselves
Tags are only half the system. Smartlists are Lexicon's dynamic playlists: define rules, and matching tracks appear — and stay current — automatically. New imports that match drop in on their own, and the contents refresh when you open the Smartlist (at most once every 30 seconds, for performance). Archived tracks are excluded unless you add a rule to include them.
There are two tag-specific rules:
- Has all these tags — returns tracks that contain every tag you select.
- Has none of these tags — excludes tracks containing any of the selected tags.
The combination logic is worth getting right:
- For AND across dimensions, set the Smartlist to All Rules and stack rules — for example Has all these tags: Peak plus an Energy range plus Has none of these tags: Vocal.
- For OR across several tag conditions, keep it on All Rules and link the relevant rules with the OR link. (OR only works when the Smartlist is set to All Rules — that's the gotcha.)
A practical example: a "Peak-time, high energy, instrumental" crate is Has all these tags: Peak AND Energy ≥ your threshold AND Has none of these tags: Vocal. It will keep filling itself every time you tag new music.
Want a Smartlist per mood or per genre without building each by hand? The Smartlist Generator creates Smartlists in bulk from a field or a Custom Tag category, and won't duplicate ones it already generated when you re-run it.
For the "Setlist Status" dimension, this is where the colour/rating flag pays off: a Smartlist matching Is colour = (your "played" colour) becomes a live "rest these" list, and the inverse gives you everything still fresh.
Tag fast, or you won't tag at all
A taxonomy dies if tagging is slow. A few ways to keep it frictionless:
- The tag popup — Show the Custom Tags column in the track browser and click a cell to open it, or press T (the default hotkey). Arrow Up/Down to move, type to filter, Enter to toggle a tag, Escape to save and close.
- Number shortcuts — Right-click a tag on the Custom Tags page and assign it a number, then bind that number in Lexicon's keyboard shortcuts. Assign the same number to several tags to apply them all in one press.
- Recipes for bulk work — Select a batch of tracks, right-click → Edit → Recipes, and add, remove, or replace tags across all of them at once. The Import tags from text recipe reads hashtags like
#Techno #Vocalsfrom a field; tags it doesn't recognise land in an Imported Tags category for you to file later.
If you're coming from Rekordbox, your MyTags (Rekordbox 6/7) import automatically with your library — though Rekordbox caps MyTags at four categories, so Lexicon is where your taxonomy finally gets room to breathe.
Make it survive the trip back to your DJ app
Your tags are useless on a USB if they don't travel. Use the Field Mapper on the Sync page: set All Custom Tags as the source and Comment as the target to write them out as hashtags (e.g. #Peak #Instrumental), so they're searchable in Rekordbox, Serato DJ Pro, Engine DJ, or wherever you play. You can map a single category instead of all tags if you only want, say, your Mood labels in the comments.
Standardise the eight dimensions, spend one session tagging your core crates, and wire up a handful of Smartlists. After that the system runs itself — and you walk into every gig with crates that already know what the room needs.
