Author Archives: mmpartee

Old Year Gratitude; New Year Hope

Gratitude to you and Happy New 2024!

As we begin 2024, I’d like to express my deep gratitude for you. I think you are amazing. You create beauty using your creativity, imagination, sweat, and determination. You teach and make lasting, important impressions on the next generation. And you make it possible for me to continue to deliver inspiring soundtracks for your routines. Thank you, to all of my fabulous clients, and I hope that 2024 is your best year yet!

Thanks to you, in 2023, I completed 511 stage-ready, clean song edits and mixes, which includes 11 Santa Recital welcome soundtracks and 22 Spring recital/show welcome soundtracks. I love it when my soundtracks inspire your choreo, and I would love to see the completed routines when you have video of them being performed! (By the way, my production schedule is full through February 12th, and I can’t wait to get your projects that I can complete shortly after that date!)

Logic Pro workstation showing two audio plugins

Restoring the Bass

Are you working with a song which has an incredible groove, but is lacking in the low end (bass)? As an experienced audio engineer, I have the tools and techniques to restore the bass to what it should be. I use an array of digital audio tools separating the drums, bass, and vocals, from the rest of the music, to bring up the thump of the low end without creating mush or distortion. Below is a screenshot of a session where I restored the low end on an incredible Tower of Power-horns type song called Copchase.

Here’s a one minute mp3 of the before and after: Copchase, Before and After mastering for bass restoration

This one is now stage-ready, and will sound great on any sound system that can reproduce bass well. May the groove be with you!

Santa reviews his "nice" list while an elf looks over his shoulder in amusement

Elevate your holiday recital with a welcome soundtrack from Santa!

Elevate your studio’s holiday show with a magical welcome soundtrack from Squirrel Trench Audio! Imagine how excited your dancers’ parents and family members will be when they hear Santa welcoming them to YOUR studio’s recital!

Listen to how incredible this sounds, and imagine Santa saying YOUR studio’s name: Madison Avenue Dance Studio’s Holiday Welcome soundtrack

Both the script and music of this jolly holiday welcome soundtrack will be fully customized for your studio. And no one will disobey Santa’s theater rules or else they’ll wind up on his naughty list! Email me at morriss@squirreltrenchaudio.com today for pricing. Order now to get it in time for your holiday recital!

🎅 Friday, November 10 will be the last day to order a custom holiday recital welcome soundtrack without a rush charge. 🎅

Making the Impact-dance competition podcast

This morning, Making the Impact dance competition podcast released Episode 153, The Dos and Don’ts of Music Editing for Competitive Dance. The hosts of the show are Courtney Ortiz and Lesley Anne Mealor, and this week’s guests are myself and Amy Gibson. I was incredibly honored to be invited as a guest on this highly regarded and popular dance podcast. It was an immense pleasure to talk with Courtney, Lesley, and Amy for an hour. The conversation was excellent and time flew by in an instant. Listen to this informative episode here.

I am excited that this episode has been published! I hope that listeners come away with new knowledge about how to prepare your music so that it’s ready for the competition stage, or any performance stage for that matter. Listeners may gain a greater appreciation for how much a great soundtrack can elevate a dance routine.

Please comment below with any insights or tips that you may have learned. If you would like to learn more about making sure your music is stage-ready, get a copy of my free 5-page PDF: Top Ten Tips for Creating Stage-Ready Music

Find out more about my Catalog of stage-ready clean song edits and mixes. Each one is optimized to give your choreography maximum emotional impact.

Learn more about my custom Magical Recital Welcome Soundtracks.

To connect with me, email me at morriss@squirreltrenchaudio.com or message me on Facebook.

Work and Play Barbie mix

Work and Play Barbie – a spectacular new clean mix with dialog from the movie, featuring the songs Work It, Barbie Dreams, Pink, and Dance the Night. This mix is 2:27 in routine length, and $19.99. Click or tap to hear a full-length preview of it:
Work and Play Barbie mix preview

To get this stage-ready mix, Venmo me at Morriss-Partee or PayPal me at morriss@squirreltrenchaudio.com. Squirrel Trench Audio is your source for clean, stage-ready music including squeaky-clean versions of Barbie Girl and hundreds more! Check out the catalog with 1300 song edits and mixes here: Squirrel Trench catalog

Making the Impact: Competition Dance Podcast

Honored to have taped Episode 1 of Season 5 of the amazing Making the Impact dance comp podcast! It was so fun to talk with Courtney, Lesley, and fellow guest Amy, the time flew by in an instant! I got a chance to explain some fundamental techniques for how to edit music for choreo beautifully, and tips for making sure your music is stage-ready! Release date is Thursday, Sept 21, so mark your calendars and subscribe to their podcast if you haven’t already!

Get my TOP 10 TIPS for creating Stage-Ready Music for choreo, plus two bonus tips! Just click the link and enter your email to get this FREE 5-page PDF and also sign up for my new monthly e-newsletter! https://squirreltrench.ck.page/0aacb6081f

“See the music, hear the dance” — George Balanchine

Maximum Musicality: How to edit music for choreography beautifully

Chapter 1: Why great music is a foundation for great dance

“Dance is music made visible.” – George Balenchine

“Musicality” is often a scoring criteria in dance competitions. Musicality makes perfect sense in tap, which is the most musical form of dance. Tap is a form of percussion. Tap dancers in particular are keenly aware of musical concepts such as tempo and beats. Many tap dancers also play a musical instrument in addition to their feet. So it’s quite natural for tap dancers to work on the ‘musicality’ of their performances.

But for other styles of dance, it may seem odd that “musicality” is a desired characteristic. Why is ‘musicality’ one of the attributes that good dancers have? In order to understand why, let’s examine what musicality in dance means. While there may not be an agreed-on definition of musicality in dance, it often refers to the concept of how connected the dancers are to the music. The idea of connecting to the music goes beyond simply moving in time with the music. Musicality covers a range of ideas – Do the dancers give the audience the impression that they “feel” their music? Does the dancers’ performance seem like it fits hand-in-glove with their soundtrack? Does it feel like the music was written exclusively for this particular dance performance? If these ideas compose the concept of ‘musicality’, then it’s clear why having excellent ‘musicality’ is one of the highest compliments dancers can receive.

In addition to dance, there are other disciplines which marry visuals to soundtracks – motion picture and musical theater are the most prominent. One of the most famous film composers of all time is John Williams, who has been the exclusive composer of Steven Spielberg’s movies since 1972. In a recent interview of both Williams and Spielberg, Williams was asked what his job was. His insightful response was that his job “is to inform and improve the process of storytelling through music.” 

In a certain sense, a dance routine can be thought of as a three minute movie. Many of the elements of movie-making are needed to create a dance performance – costume, hair, makeup, props, lighting, a stage, ‘action’, and of course, a soundtrack. When viewed through this lens, one better understands how music enhances visuals, because most of us can instantly recall motion picture soundtracks that have frightened or excited us – the terror of the Jaws theme or the thrill of Star Wars just to name two of John Williams’ classic compositions. To get a better understanding of what music delivers to film, visit YouTube and search for “movie scenes without music.” There, you’ll find a number of famous movie scenes with the music removed. Nothing but the dialog and ambient sounds remain. For the most part, these scenes devoid of music entirely lose their meaning, and most importantly, they completely lose their emotional impact. 

Building on the foundation of a soundtrack, a choreographer can use movement synchronized to music to tell a story over time. That story is often an emotional one, and can even move an audience to tears or to laughter. 

Some may question the importance of creating beautiful soundtracks for dance. Does one thump or awkward break in a popular song really ruin an otherwise beautiful dance performance? That decision is up to every choreographer or dance studio owner. Does a jarring sound break the audiences’ enjoyment of a graceful dancer? Most would answer yes. 

Are dance competition judges going to deduct points because a dance teacher did a poor job editing a song? On the surface of it, the answer should be no. Judges do their best not to penalize a dancer for something out of the dancer’s control. But during a long weekend with very long days, judges can’t help but take in all aspects of a performance, not just the dancer’s movement. 

In a March 2023 episode of Making The Impact podcast, a competition judge mentioned how jarring it is when a dancer exits the stage during a part of the music which does not “feel” like the end…. The judge is caught off guard that the routine has ended. I have seen this happen on the competition stage as well. This speaks to how important musical cues are to the audience’ perception of the performance’s story arc from beginning to end. As audience members, we naturally expect that it should be easy to discern when a dance routine has started and when it has ended, and are startled when there is a disconnect from our expectations. 

Inexperienced music editors may not have a good understanding of song structure. When confronted with a song which is too long for choreography, they may think the way to transform the song into a soundtrack for choreography is to simply start at the beginning of the song, and then fade it out at the desired length of the routine. While this may be the easiest way to change the song’s length, it is never ideal.

Here’s why: A good song takes the listener on a journey… a journey which has several waypoints, including a beginning, pinnacle, and ending. From an introduction, the song develops and explores, and eventually reaches a peak before coming to a conclusion. A song which fades out in the middle is like starting out on a journey only to become stranded halfway through, never reaching the most exciting part of the trip. Being stranded in the middle of a journey is never a good experience. It ruins what was otherwise a lovely trip up until that point.

 This stands in contrast to a well-edited song which takes us on the same journey as the full-length song, from beginning, to development, to the pinnacle, and finally the last destination, but does it in a shorter time, with fewer detours along the way. The beautifully edited song takes the same journey as the original song, but lingers for less time in some areas, and may avoid optional stops entirely. The beautifully edited song gives us a shorter trip, but ensures that we experience all of the most exciting and important parts of the journey. 

When a song is faded-out without care as to where the fade-out occurs in the song, it is a disservice to the dancers. In routines with an ill-conceived fade-out, hearing the song’s volume start to drop is the dancer’s queue to exit the stage. When the fade-out happens at a point in the song where it doesn’t make sense, the audience is taken by surprise. By the time the song reaches silence, the dancer is already in the wings. After a few more seconds go by, the surprised audience realizes the performance has ended and begins to applaud. This unfortunate scenario robs the dancer of being on stage to receive the audience’s applause – applause that they surely richly deserve after so much hard work that they and their teachers have put into creating the performance. With today’s technology and resources, there is simply no reason that any dancer should ever perform with anything less than flawless music.

It is up to each dance studio owner to decide how important it is for their studio’s routines to have beautiful soundtracks. But in any case, it’s worth keeping in mind that dance students are impressionable youngsters who are going through the most formative times of their lives. Each dance student will hear their group and solo songs hundreds of times in the course of a season’s rehearsals. This music forms the soundtrack of their lives. For that reason alone, every dancer deserves that music to be as perfect as it can be.

Maximum Musicality: How to edit music for choreography, beautifully

Introduction

Dance is the art of human movement. And while dance can exist without music, most dance is performed with a soundtrack. Dance is an expression of our human experience, an expression which is both visual and auditory. In dance, the importance of costume, lighting, and movement is well understood. While most dancers intuitively understand how important music is to dance, what is often underappreciated is how the emotional arc of a soundtrack can dramatically affect how an audience perceives a routine.

For more than ten years, I have had the great honor of creating several thousand soundtracks for choreographers around the world, primarily in the United States, but also in Canada, Australia, the U.K., and New Zealand. It’s my belief that every dancer deserves to perform with flawless, beautiful music. Every time I take on a new music editing or mixing project, I give it the same care and attention as if my own child were performing with it.

This book is for choreographers, and those who create soundtracks for their routines. Having attended numerous dance competitions and recitals where dance was performed with the soundtracks I created, I have developed an array of techniques for making these soundtracks excellent. I have also watched a multitude of dance routines performed with less-than-ideal soundtracks. The purpose of this book is to give you the practical knowledge I’ve gained working with hundreds of choreographers, along with my musical and audio engineering expertise and experience, so that you too, can produce flawless music for choreography.

While there is a dizzying diversity of music genres used in dance routines, this text focuses on transforming popular songs into soundtracks for choreography. Pop songs today generally range from three to four minutes in length and need to be transformed into two to two-and-a-half minutes versions for choreography. There are two disciplines needed to create flawless song edits for choreography – musicianship and audio engineering. Those two disciplines dovetail with understanding the intersection between music and dance, and the general cues that young dancers rely on to remember the choreography that they learn and perform. 

Music and audio technology have made impressive leaps forward over the past two decades. Fortunately, long gone are the days when choreographers would use two cassette decks to painstakingly align different parts of a song to try to get it just right. There was very little that could be done to create a soundtrack for choreography beyond simply splicing different parts of the song together, cutting out one or more sections of the song. Thus was born the common terminology of a song “cut.” Dancers often refer to their soundtracks as “cuts” of music. 

Digital audio and personal computer technology represent a sea-change in what is possible for transforming songs into ideal soundtracks for choreography. With today’s laptops and the digital tools that are readily available, nearly everyone has access to an amazing arsenal of powerful tools for shaping and transforming music. Today’s laptops have more audio processing power than million-dollar recording studios built in the 1970s and ‘80s. Recording engineers of that era couldn’t have imagined that eventually we could put entire virtual orchestras inside of a portable computer that is less than one inch in thick and weighs only a few pounds. 

But while audio technology has advanced to the point where it’s relatively easy to shorten songs on a laptop, or even a tablet or smartphone, sometimes there are almost too many choices. For example, at what bitrate should an mp3 be saved? Should I save with constant or variable bit rate encoding, and why am I even being asked this question?

Beyond minor issues like these, I routinely find errors and glitches in music for choreo that I receive for repairs or cleaning. And I have also heard far too many routines’ soundtracks played at top volume for competition in civic centers and auditoriums with jarring skips, mismatched phrases, breaks, and thumps. Such glitches take an audience (including parents and judges) “out of the moment” of enjoying the dance performance. What’s more, the timing irregularities introduced by bad edits makes it needlessly difficult for dancers to count the music. It also throws off the rhythm of the choreo. 

You’ve probably heard these mistakes as well if you have watched other’s dance performances, in music that otherwise flows smoothly. Strangely, while you’ve heard these mistakes in others’ music quite clearly, you may have not heard them in your own music edits — and there is a reason for that.

It’s not that your own music edits don’t have flaws. It’s in the nature of how the brain works, that you are less likely to notice flaws in your own musical creations. When you listen to a piece of music, over and over again, it eventually becomes “normal” to you, even if there are one or more issues readily apparent to anyone else listening to it. This is why good audio engineers need to work fast, or else they too fall into the trap of thinking that what they are hearing is normal or good. 

When working with music, ideally you want to maintain perspective about what you are hearing. There are several ways you can maintain a relatively unbiased perspective while creating your own music edits. One way is to know your tools and techniques extremely well, so that you can work swiftly. The faster you work, the better perspective you can maintain. Another method is to take frequent breaks. Yet another method is to “put away” your edits for a couple of days or even a week, ensuring that you don’t listen to them at all. But even this technique won’t work if you’ve already listened to your own edits more than a dozen times.

Illustration of a woman wearing detective hat and high heels, holding a magnifying lens on her hand and looking at footprints on the floor.

How to search the Squirrel Trench catalog of choreo-ready music

In this 13-minute video, I explain how to search the Squirrel Trench catalog of choreo-ready music. It currently contains more than 1300 flawless, clean song edits and mixes, and is organized by dance style. There are also theme bundles and spoken word soundtracks. For more info, email me at morriss@squirreltrenchaudio.com.

Barbie Girl Clean promo

Barbie Girl, Squeaky Clean edits for choreo

The Barbie movie is out today! Barbie Girl is a great song, but some of the lyrics are highly inappropriate for use in a dance studio. I have cleaned this one, removing the lines “undress me everywhere,” “kiss me here, touch me there”, and others, to present you with:
• Barbie Girl (Squeaky Clean) (3:04, 2:56, 2:41, 2:26 – $9.99)

Click to listen: 2:26 Preview2:41 Preview2:56 Preview3:04 Preview

Email me at morriss@squirreltrenchaudio.com if you’d like this version! Browse 1300 more clean edits and mixes in my Squirrel Trench catalog.