Category Archives: Audio Editing Tips

What is possible in music editing for dance?

I realize that there are many people coming to this site who may not be aware of what can be done to music to get it into shape for a dance routine. So here are just a few of the things that can be changed or re-shaped in getting a song ready for choreography. If you have any questions about it, don’t hesitate to send me an email with your questions!

  • Edit the song for smoothness – Many amateur music editors will cut a song in a spot that doesn’t make sense for a smooth flow. We have an in-depth understanding of music structure that enables us to deliver a polished edit that flows best for choreography. Just let us know how long the routine will be, and we will deliver your song at that length. Email me for more info; pricing is $39 per song.
  • Speed up a song – Advances in digital music processing enable us to speed a song up (or slow a song down) by a little bit or a whole lot. Tempo is usually measured in Beats Per Minute (or BPM). Many dance songs have a tempo in the ballpark of 120-126 BPM. Faster songs that are danceable are 132-140 BPM, and there are other songs that work at 90-100 BPM. It’s all about the groove. Since most dancers don’t know the BPM of a song, it’s okay to tell us that you want a song sped up by 5% or slowed down by 10%.
  • Slow down a song – see above. Any music can be sped up or slowed down. We can even deliver several versions for you at different speeds, for rehearsal purposes.
  • Create a unique remix – Given the right parameters, we can come up with a unique remix of a song or combination of songs. This takes some collaboration, so if you are interested in something like this, this or this, then send me an email, and we can talk further on the phone or via email. Usually this process starts with a concept for the dance, and continues from there.
  • Make a song louder – Dancers often want their music to sound as loud as every other song that is being played on a sound system. If you are using a song from a movie soundtrack, or an older song from many years ago, and it’s not loud enough compared to other songs being used, send it my way and we’ll get it just right for you. Sometimes older songs could use more bass, and we can increase the bass as well. (more on Mastering for Loudness here).
  • Remove swear words or other objectionable lyrics – Many songs have a clean version available, but many do not. Some songs have objectionable lyrics throughout, and should not be used for family-oriented dance. Sometimes a song will be perfect, but have one or two objectionable words or phrases. I have successfully removed such words from many songs, even ones where it seemed impossible. I am proud to have helped one dance group improve their score because competition judges were deducting points because of the objectionable lyrics in a Christina Aguilera Burlesque song. I removed the offending lyrics that were repeated six times throughout the song, and the routine no longer received deductions due to the content of the music.

That covers the basics. Happy dancing!

What happens if my CD won’t play at a dance competition?

For those of you who make, create, remix, cut, or edit music for dance competition, there is NO worse feeling in the world than watching your dancers get announced, take their opening position, and then….. nothing. Silence. The competition emcee then asks the dancer to leave the stage while the technical difficulties get ironed out.

At a dance competition in Worcester this past weekend, something similar, and yet worse, happened twice to a dance studio. The song played about halfway through, with no problems, and then abruptly went silent in the middle of the song. Fortunately these dancers are already pros at a young age, and finished out their dance routines with no music, with only the cheers from the crowd to encourage them in the last half of their dances.

There is NO REASON this should EVER happen to you.

Without knowing more about how this particular studio created their CD-Rs (Recordable CDs), the likely culprit is the media. You can buy cheap CD-Rs just about anywhere nowadays. Unfortunately these cheap CD-Rs often have bad batches, where something went amiss in the manufacturing process, rendering them unplayable.

To avoid this from happening to you, only use the BEST CD-Rs… which are made by Tayio Yuden, now owned by JVC. These are the gold standards. The optics are impeccable. The burn is greater. The digital data is held more distinctly. And best of all, they are the SAME PRICE per 100-pack than any other brand of CD-R. So what are you waiting for? If you inkjet label your CDs, here is a link to a 100-bundle of white inkjet printable Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs for about $35 on Amazon. If you want the silver version and label your CDs with a Sharpie marker, you can get 100 silver-faced Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs for a few bucks less. A 100-pack of Staples brand CD-Rs costs the same. Remind me how much Staples knows about maximizing optical laser beam recognition and tracking in CD-Rs again?

This CD may look cool, but it is scratched beyond playability. This is what can happen to CDs stored in dance bags without protection.

In any case, you should always burn a backup CD of all of your songs, just in case your primary CD gets scratched. If you print multiple songs on your back-up CD, burn it with four or five seconds between each song so that the emcee has time to stop the CD player before the next song begins.

If you put your CDs in your dance bag, MAKE SURE to seal it inside a plastic baggie. Otherwise, dirt from the dance bag will work its way into the CD sleeve and wreak havoc on the silver surface, scratching it beyond readability.

I have no relationship or endorsement from JVC/Taiyo Yuden, but I can unequivocally state that Squirrel Trench Audio uses ONLY JVC/Taiyo Yuden for burning competition CDs and backups.

Protect your CDs inside your dance bags

Have you ever had this experience? You are at the dance competition and the CD with your competition music won’t play. The judges ask you for a backup CD, you give it to them, and it also won’t play. You look at the underside of your CDs, and much to your dismay, they are complete scratched up.

I sincerely hope this has never happened to you, and that it never will.

I’ve previously written about using only top-quality, name-brand CD-Rs to minimize the chances of getting a bad CD-R, or a bad lot of CD-Rs. I’ve also given you the Top 5 care tips for your precious CDs.

Tip number 5 from the preceding list is DO NOT put your CDs in your dance bag! The reason why is that, while you may have your CDs in a jewel case or a sleeve, all it takes is ONE grain of sand to work it’s way into the sleeve for it to start scratching the sensitive plastic surface, making it completely unreadable.

My girlfriend, Lesley Lambert, who is a dance teacher and a dance mom, came up with a brilliant solution. Since it only makes sense that dancers are going to carry around their competition CDs, backup CDs, and rehearsal CDs in their dance bag, she realized she could protect them from dirt and foreign objects by putting the CD into a plastic baggie. A standard sandwich baggie may be too small; one size bigger may be required.

So if you are going to put your CDs in your dance bag, put them inside a plastic bag and seal them first, so that they remain playable!

Retaining song structure in music editing & remixing

If you edit, cut or remix music for dance, gymnastics, figure skaters, vocalists or any other purpose, this is perhaps the most important article you can read on the subject.

What’s the Plan, Stan?

Most music has a structure… a road map that that takes the listener on a journey from point A to point B with several interesting stops along the way. While music is auditory, if you were to visualize the journey by breaking a song down into its component pieces, you would see something like this:

While many songs have variations on this theme, this graph is nonetheless a useful starting point in visualizing or understanding the structure of a song, including intro, verses (purple), choruses (blue), and almost always some type of bridge section (green).

Music editors who don’t pay attention to the structure of music typically make the minimum number of edits, or cuts, to get the music down from, say, four minutes, to the required routine length, which is usually three minutes, two and a half minutes, or two minutes. What usually ends up happening is that a fade-out is thrown onto music wherever the time limit occurs. If you were to visualize the resulting song structure, you’d see something like this:

While there is nothing “wrong” with this picture per se, it does not have as powerful an impact as the original song. It doesn’t feel complete, and the overall “shape” of the journey is now lacking.

In addition, we’ve now lost the bridge entirely. The variety from the original song is gone. Musically speaking, the bridge is often the most interesting part of the song and the emotional peak of intensity is often in the bridge.

When the structure is “chopped off” as shown above, instead of visiting three different regions, we’ve now visited the same two regions two times. This type of repetition does not lend itself well to the linear nature of dance choreography. The other problem with this edit is that we’ve also lost the ending. The audience is left hanging because the routine never reaches a conclusion.

So in order to maximize artistic integrity of the song AND meet the linear requirements of dance choreography, music should be edited and remixed in order to retain the maximum amount of interest in moving from point A to point B, taking the audience on a journey, stopping off at scenic points of interest along the way, before finally ending up at the destination.

In almost all cases, retaining the bridge section of a song improves the result of the song editing process. This is because in dance choreography, there are rarely repeated movements. In dance choreography, there is almost always a linear progression that evolves from the beginning to end of a routine, without the repeating verse/chorus/verse/chorus patterns you find in music. Most dance routines consist of a linear series of moves that flow, one after another after another.

A song will match up better with dance choreography if it “keeps moving” from one musical idea to the next. Instead of chopping down a song as if it were a tree, giving it a verse/chorus/verse/chorus pattern, you give yourself, as dance choreographer, more musical variety and movement if you edit the song to follow a verse/chorus/bridge/chorus format.

Here is the same song structure as the first graph, but edited to retain the integrity of the original, including the bridge. Note how the shape of emotional intensity is still a journey that builds up, goes over the mountain top of the bridge, before finally coming to rest with the closing chorus and ending:

Note that the intro has been shortened, as has the final chorus. In this chart, I’ve indicated Chorus 1 and 2 as combined; there are many ways to handle this depending on the nature of the song’s chorus arrangement.

By understanding a song’s structure and retaining the overall feel and variety of it, you can make a remix or edit of that song and still leave the audience feeling satisfied with the journey, even though the trip took less time.

If you are a dance choreographer looking to give your students the best music possible for the choreography you are going to teach them, have your music remixed by a professional ahead of time so that he or she can retain the structure. While I am happy to “smooth” out choppy or incorrectly timed edits, even after the routine has already been rehearsed, you’ll be giving your students the best music and routine possible if you start with a solid musical foundation, and that means getting the structure right, from the beginning.

If you prefer to have a professional edit or remix your music, here’s my Request Form.

Also see: How To Avoid Awkward Fadeouts for another article on this subject, complete with sample edited waveforms.

Mastering the loudness of your dance competition and recital music

11882514-ear-and-sound-waves-Stock-Vector-hearingMost of the time, when you are editing modern music for your dance routines, it’s already as loud as it can get. Make your edits, and you are done.

But for some type of music, especially ballads, lyrical songs, movie soundtrack songs, or older Broadway showtunes, soft passages sound too soft when played over dance competition sound systems.

What your music needs in this case is a process known as mastering.

Mastering is a delicate art, and even though the tools for mastering are now within reach of casual music editors, it takes a trained ear to use the tools effectively and deliver a result that sounds natural and smooth. Amateurs often use too much compression and limiting when trying to make music sound louder, but mastering engineers employ other techniques to avoid making the music sound squashed.

I highly recommend that you do not simply turn up the volume in your music editing software. This results in digital clipping distortion – an awful crackly noise, which I have occasionally heard in music played at dance competitions.

If you’ve got your dance routine music ready to go, but find that there are parts of the music that are too soft when played on competition sound systems, I can master the audio for you, to bring it to a place where it sounds great and is at the proper level for competition. A single song can be mastered for as little as $29, or email me for a quote on mastering a batch of songs. I will set up a private folder for you to upload your competition mixes. Then I will master it and send it back to you via the online folder.

If you are in doubt as to whether or not your music needs mastering, send me the file and I will listen to it for you at no obligation whatsoever. If it could benefit from mastering, I will let you know, and if it is already as loud as it can reasonably go, then I will let you know that too.

I do not advocate that your music ever gets pushed to a loud extreme… an ugly process that has developed in the digital age known as the Loudness Wars. However, music designed to be played over dance competition and recital sound systems should be at an adequate level so that the music is not drowned out by the audience, acrobatic landings, nor tap shoes.

How to avoid clicks and pops when editing music

I’m in the middle of doing a couple of fun song remixes for the talent portion of a state pre-teen pageant, and I thought I’d take a second to explain how to avoid those annoying clicks and pops when editing music for competition or recital dance routines.

If you’ve ever taken the grill off of your speakers, you’ve probably seen the cones of your speakers move in and out. This is how we hear sound; sound is vibrations traveling through air. If you’ve ever looked at the waveforms in your audio editing program, you can see that the squiggily lines representing sound move up and down over a center line. You can think of this center line as the “rest” position of your speakers. To make sound, the speaker cones travel in and out, and that can be thought of as the audio signal moving above and below the center line of your waveform.

A click or pop occurs when there is an abrupt “jump” in the way the waveform moves up and down. Basically, you are trying to avoid a straight vertical line in the transition point between the two audio segments you are splicing together.

In the image below, the audio segment on top is cut at a point where the waveform is far from the center “at rest” line. It is joined to a waveform on the bottom that is at the center line. It is the jump from one spot in the waveform to the other that causes the pop. Click on the image to enlarge:

There are two main ways that this can be avoided. One way is to only make edits at what are called “zero-crossings”…. that is, the waveform is “at rest”. In the image below, both audio segments are cut and joined together at a spot where they are both at the zero-crossing:

The other way you can avoid clicks and pops is to make a relatively short (but not ultrashort) crossfade between the two pieces of audio that you are splicing together, such as in the image below:

Here are some key points to understand why the above is a seamless edit:

  • The peaks are lined up in both tracks.
  • The crossfade occurs at a low point in the audio signal.
  • The crossfade transition between the two tracks is extremely fast, but not so ultra-fast as to create a square-wave click or pop.
  • There is never a point in the crossfade where the volume dips. (The lower track has reached full volume before the upper track begins to fade out.)

As always, your ears are the ultimate judge of the success of the crossfade.

For more audio editing tips, check out this video on how to avoid awkward fade-outs, or view all of the articles here containing audio editing tips.

Happy editing!

Maximum length for dance competition songs and remixes

Occasionally someone arrives on this site by googling for something like “song length for dance competitions.”

While there is no definitive answer, I can give you some guidance. The most important thing you can do to determine the allowable length of your song is to check the competition rules for each competition you will be entering in for the season. Most competitions follow the same guidelines for maximum allowable length.

Many competitions state that solos can not be longer than 2:45 in length, while group numbers can be 3:00. Some competitions allow for even longer songs with larger groups. For example, Star Systems allows:

• 2:45 for a solo
• 3:00 for a duo or trio
• 3:30 for a small group (4-9 dancers)
• 4:00 for a large group (10-18 dancers)
• 4:30 for productions and lines (19 or more dancers)

However, not all competitions follow these guidelines. For some competitions, 3:00 may be the maximum, no matter what size the group, so be sure to check EACH of the competition rules that your studio is entering for the season.

For recitals, many times the maximum length is 2:00.

Bear in mind that these are maximums. It’s much better to make your routine shorter and tighter than to drag it on and on with no real purpose. Also, more important than the total length is the story arch that the dance and music follow.

Here are the things I keep in mind when trying to determine the right length for a music edit or remix:

For tap or acro, endurance can be a factor, especially for younger students. For younger tappers, 2:00-2:10 can be a good length. More experienced tappers who have built up endurance can be in the 2:20-2:45 range. And in general, younger dancers will want to be in 2:15-2:30 range, and older, more experienced dancers who have developed their style and moves, and want to tell a story with their dance should have music in the 2:45-3:00 range.

Behind the scenes of a Beatles remix

It’s been a pleasure, a joy, and labor of love creating the Beatles remix called Somehow Someway. I can’t wait to see the choreography for this routine performed at Regionals and National dance competitions in 2012.

I’d thought I’d give folks a sneak peek at what went into the creation of the music for this piece.

More behind-the-scenes peeks of this remix will be posted soon. Let me know if this is useful to you, and I’ll do this for other remixes I’ve made. Questions? Comments?

Video tutorial: How to Avoid Awkward Fade-outs (Part 2)

Here is Part 2, in which I explain how to avoid awkward fade-outs when editing songs for your dance routines:

In case you missed it, here’s Part 1 of this video tutorial, where I explain why this is important.

Let me know what you think, and what aspects of editing music for dance you’d like me to cover in future video tutorials!

Video Tutorial: How to Avoid Awkward Fade-outs (Part 1)

In this two-part video, I explain both WHY you should avoid awkward fade-outs whenever possible, and HOW to do it. Here is Part 1, WHY:

If you already know WHY you should avoid fade-outs, here is Part 2, where I show you HOW to do it.

For more detailed information on how to avoid awkward fade-outs when editing music for your dance routines, here’s a web page about it, in written form. Here’s more about the Top 5 song editing mistakes I hear at dance competitions.

I would love your feedback about this video. Was it useful to you? Did you learn something? What audio-editing-for-dance tips would you like to learn about next?