Author Archives: mmpartee

Buy 5, Get 5 Free

Buy 5, Get 5 Free!

It’s that time of year again – time to pick out new music for the upcoming season’s routines. If you want competition-level clean song edits and mixes, my Buy 5, Get 5 Free offer is now permanent! This offer also applies to any number of songs more than 5, so if you Buy 12, you get 12 Free! (The purchase has to be made in one request in order to qualify.) There’s no greater library of flawless, clean, choreo-ready song edits and mixes, than right here: Squirrel Trench choreo-ready music catalog

Check out the catalog, with 1300 tracks organized by style of dance, and email me at morriss@squirreltrenchaudio.com with your selections!

Recital intro voiceover soundtrack

Set the stage for your recital with a voiceover and soundtrack from Squirrel Trench Audio. A professional presentation (with a little humor thrown in) sets the tone for the performance and keeps your dance families coming back. I will write your script, have it voiced, and mix it with music that gets your audience pumped. Your choice of male or female announcer, and you can choose the background music that fits your theme. Here’s how great you can sound: Heather’s 2023 Recital intro

Email me at morriss@squirreltrenchaudio today, and we can get started!

woman pulling at her hair in frustration as she is surrounded by audio speakers flying through the air

Break a leg at competitions!

Break a leg to all of the studios starting or in full swing with competition season! If your music didn’t sound the way you expected it to when played on the stage’s sound system, email the file(s) to me at morriss@squirreltrenchaudio.com and I’ll let you know if your music track has any issues. I’ve fixed all kinds of issues including music which:

• is too soft or has other volume issues

• is missing all of the bass

• is missing parts of the song because the comp plays only the Left or Right channel

• has thumps, pops or clicks at the edit points

You have enough to worry about in making your routines be all that they can be, don’t let your music be one of them! 🙂

How to Edit Music for Choreography, beautifully

Below is the introduction for a book I am writing. I would appreciate any and all feedback you might have in the comments. I can be reached via email at: morriss@squirreltrenchaudio.com.

How to Edit Music for Choreography, beautifully by Morriss M. Partee. (c) 2023

Introduction

Dance is the art of human movement. And while dance can exist without music, most dance is performed with a soundtrack. 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 been my personal mission over that time to ensure that every dancer performs 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 it were my own child 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. My aim is to give you the practical knowledge I’ve gained working with hundreds of choreographers, and studying music and audio engineering, so that you too, can produce flawless music for choreography.

This text focuses on transforming popular songs, which are generally three to four minutes in length, into soundtracks for choreography, which usually range from two to two-and-a-half minutes.  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, often using a pencil to try to get it just right. (If you don’t know why a pencil is involved with cassettes, be glad!) What is now primitive technology came with a whole host of limitations. 

Digital audio and personal computer technology makes it so that all of us are within reach of an amazing arsenal of tools to make music for choreo that is flawless. Today’s laptop has more audio processing power at a reasonable price than the 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 ¾” of an inch in thickness. 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, what bitrate should an mp3 be saved as? 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 many errors and glitches in choreo music 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, breaks, and thumps. Such glitches take an audience (including parents and judges) “out of the moment” of enjoying the dance performance, with the worst of them creating difficulties for dancers trying to count the music.

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. 

Trying to hear your music work clearly is known as ‘maintaining perspective.’ There are several ways you can maintain perspective while creating your own music edits. The first 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.

***

Some may question the importance of creating beautiful soundtracks for dance. Does one thump or awkward break in a 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. But in any case, with today’s technology, there is no need for any dancer to ever perform with anything less than flawless music.

Here are a few more reasons I feel every dancer ought to have perfect music to perform with. From a dance studio owner’s self-interested perspective, flawlessly edited music does several things for the studio: It increases the perceived quality and professionalism of the studio, and it also increases the likelihood of student retention. One way it increases those chances  is that a beautifully edited piece of music has less repetition than when a song is simply started from the beginning and then faded-out at the two-minute or two-and-a-half minute mark. We’ve all seen the dancer on stage who performs their solo beautifully for the first two-thirds of the routine, and then suddenly forgets the next move in their choreography, and runs off the stage in embarrassment. While I don’t have a catalog of such ‘forgetting choreo’ moments, I am convinced that some of these occur because the music is so repetitive the dancer loses track of where they are in the song. 

The other way in which flawlessly edited music helps studios retain students is by avoiding the awkward fade-out. When music is faded-out at the routine length, it is an incredible disservice to the dancer. When the music volume starts to drop, that is the dancer’s queue to exit the stage… and usually these fade-outs take the audience by surprise. So that when the music finally is over, the dancer is already in the wings, and only then does the audience start to applaud. This robs the dancer of being center stage to fully receive the audience’s applause that they so richly deserve after all of their hard work. 

But these are the self-interested reasons for a dance studio to utilize nothing but flawless soundtracks for their routines. Other reasons go beyond self-interest. Dance students are impressionable youngsters who are going through the most formative times of their lives. Each dance student will hear their chosen 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.

Why choose Squirrel Trench Audio?

I am proud to say that the Squirrel Trench Audio catalog now contains more than 1100 flawless clean edits and mixes, and more are being added regularly. Some of you may not yet have discovered the joys of making your music selections from this catalog. If you haven’t checked it out yet, here is what you get in every track:

  • Every clean edit and mix has been carefully analyzed for song structure, and the resulting edit is optimized for integrity. This ensures that the soundtrack for your choreography has a beginning, middle, and ending, and that the emotional high-point of the song is retained so that your choreo’s emotional impact on the audience is maximized. Too many self-created edits leave the emotional payoff of a song on the cutting room floor, which robs your choreo of impact.
  • Objectionable lyrics have been cleverly omitted, obscured, or replaced wherever they occur. Every cleaned lyric retains the original timing and beat, so that your performers remain on track, and your audience remains focused on your performers.
  • The audio quality of every song and mix in the catalog is impeccable. Too many self-created edits are saved at a low audio resolution. This is similar to saving a photo at low-res. The result is pixelated. With most audio programs, you don’t even hear the damage done to a song saved at low resolution until you play it back. Every track in the Squirrel Trench Audio catalog is saved at a very high audio quality.
  • Transitions are smooth and flawless. Really, this goes without saying. In some cases, virtual instruments are played to ensure that transition is flawless. Reverb and delay are employed where appropriate. Your audience will not even notice that the song has been shortened, keeping their focus where it belongs; on your dancers.
  • Tempo is always analyzed to ensure edits points are precise down to the millisecond where possible. Counts are never compromised, ensuring consistent 8-counts throughout the routine. Sadly, too many instances of self-created edits miss beats, creating strange 6-counts, 7-counts, and even such awkward results as 5.5-counts. In the Squirrel Trench Audio catalog, no song ever misses a beat.
  • Volumes are all at a consistent level. You never have to go diving at your volume knob to turn down a too-loud track, or turn up a too-soft track. If used in competition, you will never experience the embarrassment of your song being abnormally soft in comparison to others.
  • Heads and tails are optimized. Songs do not start abruptly, nor are there long lag-times between when “Play” is pressed before the music actually starts. Endings are smooth and natural, never awkwardly cut off.
  • Every track has a hard ending – no fade outs are employed, which robs your dancers of receiving the applause they deserve on stage instead of in the wings.

Too many self-created edits have issues with one or more of the items listed above. Many dance teachers don’t realize that when such music is played at competition or recital, hearing awkward jumps, skips, or fade-outs takes the audience right out of the routine. With every handcrafted Squirrel Trench Audio edit and mix, you are guaranteed that your audience will maintain their focus throughout the soundtrack where it belongs: on your choreo and your dancers.

When you want the best quality, flawless clean edits and mixes, always turn to the professional resource that you can trust: the Squirrel Trench Audio catalog. And even more amazingly, the pricing is incredibly affordable. Clean edits start at just $4.99 and mixes are $14.99-$29.99, and discounts are always given when you order three or more tracks. Email me at morriss@squirreltrenchaudio.com for more information or to place an order.

Warrior for Peace, choreographed

I am pleased to share Julie Bartoletti and Carly Higgins Sargent’s (of Dance FX) interpretation of Warrior for Peace spoken word soundtrack:

Watch this space for another choreographic interpretation as a duo from Susan’s School of Dance, as soon I have a link to its video. If you are interested in this track, it is $9.99. Please email me with the request and I will send a PayPal invoice for that amount.

Senseless

I was deeply saddened by the Las Vegas shooting. In the tragedy’s aftermath, I decided to create an original spoken word soundtrack that I hope you will consider bringing to your audiences through your choreographic talents. This soundtrack features two young ladies giving voice to my words. Click the play button below to hear Senseless. (Note: this soundtrack may engender deep feelings of sadness. Please be emotionally prepared before listening.)

I am making this track available for $9.99. If you are interested in purchasing it, please email me at morriss@squirreltrenchaudio.com.

Protected versus unprotected Apple music files

People who use Apple Music run into the inability to edit m4p (protected) files. Here is your guide to understanding what is going on. Apple has has two music file formats:

  • m4p (protected), and
  • m4a (not protected).

If you bought a song on iTunes before 2009, it was in m4p (protected) format. If you bought a song after 2009 on iTunes, or used their sync system to convert m4p into m4a files, then it is in m4a (not protected) format.

However, if you create an offline copy of a song via Apple Music (streaming service), then THAT is m4p (protected) format. So if you have made an “offline” copy of a song via Apple Music, you need to delete that copy (the m4p protected file) before you can download (or re-download) the purchased m4a (not protected) file.

If you don’t want to have to deal with the hassle of figuring out if you have a protected or unprotected version of the song, and don’t want to have to know the difference between m4a and m4p files, I recommend NOT using Apple Music for streaming, and use Spotify instead. That keeps the difference between what you’ve bought and what you are streaming nice and SEPARATE.

There is Always Hope

Squirrel Trench Audio is pleased to present a new, spoken word soundtrack, with an anti-suicide message: There is Always Hope. Music is One More Light by Linkin Park. Voice over written by Andrea Norris Olsen and voiced by Shaunessey Lambert. Edited for a 2:51 routine length. $9.99. Click here to listen to the preview: There is Always Hope.

Email me if you are interested in getting this track.

More spoken word soundtracks for choreography can be found here: Squirrel Trench spoken word soundtracks.

Making choreographers happy

When you need perfect music for a new routine, Squirrel Trench Audio’s catalog of more than 750 ready-to-go clean edits and mixes is an amazing resource. Here’s what Maggy had to say about it:

“A huge thank you to Squirrel Trench Audio for their fast and professional service. You have saved me many hours of editing. So many amazing cuts and songs to choose from! This site is a dance teacher/choreographers dream come true!”

—Maggy Elias Sonoski, September 3, 2017

The catalog is even searchable by dance style. Check out the catalog and find the perfect music for your next routine!