Tag Archives: dance studio owner

Soloist’s CDs are ready!

It’s that time of year… when the anticipation reaches a peak with the first dance competition of the season coming up in just days or weeks. The students have been rehearsing for months. Costumes have been selected and have arrived. Now it’s time to make sure that all of the studio’s music is perfect too. Squirrel Trench Audio has been busy burning-competition ready CDs on high quality Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs, complete with competition-ready labels. Note the nine rectangular spaces on the lower part of the CD; these spots enable the studio to write the number of the routine on each CD for every competition entered.

Competition CDs are ready to go

If you are a studio owner, and you want to make your music prep this easy, contact me about our Studio programs— a full service where you simply select the music for each dancer, and receive a set of rehearsal CDs for each student, as well as competition-ready CDs for performance. With this program, it is possible for the studio to make a small profit on their music each year instead of incurring an expense.

For more information, email me. The sooner the better, because the 2012-2013 dance season will be here before you know it!

An Open Message to Dance Studio Owners

Camden Yards Fireworks!

Here it is, the Fourth of July. While families kick back and grill up some hamburgers and hot dogs and enjoy fireworks, dance studio owners are trying to catch their breath now that recitals are over, and the only thing left in the current dance season is Nationals.

Right after Nationals are dance camps, and for some studios, that is when new music is introduced for next season’s choreography. For those studios, now is the time to start prepping the music, in time for their dance camp debut!

How is music handled at your dance studio? Who edits the music to the right length for routines? Is it left up to each teacher to supply their own music? Is it a hodgepodge of aunts, uncles, spouses, friends, and students, all of whom have varying degrees of musical talent and audio editing skill? Or do you have it professional produced by a studio engineer who not only knows music, but understands the demands of skillful editing expressly for dance choreography?

If you are currently producing your dance music via the hodgepodge/patchwork method, and are tired of the hassle of pulling together CDs from all different people, I would urge you to consider Squirrel Trench Audio’s Soup-to-Nuts Music Editing Service. With this program, ALL of your studio’s music will be professionally edited AND each one of your students will receive their very own practice CD with all of their songs for the season. Not only that, you will also get a set of complete teacher CDs as well as a set of backup CDs. And by charging a nominal music fee to each of your students for their practice CD, your studio will actually make a small profit on the whole thing.

You pour your heart and soul into teaching your dancers, making sure every detail is right in their choreography, their costume, hair and make-up. Shouldn’t the music be as crisp and perfect as it can possibly be as well?

And what could be better? You, as studio owner, no longer have to worry about the music that your teachers are using, your students each get their own practice CD, your teachers each get CDs with all of their songs, you get a backup set of CDs for competition, and the studio makes a small profit.

It’s a win-win-win situation. Currently, Squirrel Trench Audio is doing this program for OnStage Dance in Stratford, Ontario. We have the opportunity to provide this package to two more dance studios this season. If you are interested, email me right away. Tell me approximately how many students your studio has, and I will email you a spreadsheet to show you how the financials could work for your particular studio.

Break a leg at Nationals and for the 2011-2012 dance season!

The economics of quality music in dance studios

Dance studio owners, who creates the music at your studio? Whose responsibility is it? Since most commercial songs are 3:30 to 4:30 in length, and most dance routines are between 2:00 and 2:55, who does the editing? Is it up to the students? Teachers? You? Or do you use a professional service?

In some studios, the music editing is up to the dance teachers. The teachers are the ones selecting the songs for the students, so it’s up to each one of them individually to get the song edited down to the correct length.

I’m going to suggest that this is not the best scenario to produce optimal results, especially if you run a high quality, top calibre studio.

As a dance teacher, your instructors are experts at many facets of dance, and teaching proper dance techniques to students. However, seamless music editing is not an expertise for a vast majority of dance teachers. The result is that your studio winds up with competition performances that might be visually beautiful, but have a variety of aural scars and mistakes. You wouldn’t put your dancers on stage with tattered costumes, so why would you put dancers on stage with scarred music? Especially for routines that are being graded in Regional or National Competitions, where one of the components is musicality. Especially considering that the music is pumped out to the dancers, audience and judges on high-powered sound systems at loud volumes…. where every pop and glitch is magnified.

Your dance teachers should be working on their choreography, not struggling to figure out how to edit music with no jumps or hiccups, which usually leads to using substandard music in their routines.

Once your teachers have selected the right song for their students, you, as the studio owner, should be enabling them to have their songs professionally remixed for dance routine length. Then your teachers will be using seamless music for their choreography.

You might wish that you could have professional-level music editing, so that your routines sound as good as they look. But the expense might be what’s holding you back. If that’s the case, I’d like to show you how you can use professional quality music editing for your routines AND at the same time make a small profit for your studio on the music. If that sounds appealing to you, email me with the number of recreational and competition students at your studio, and I’ll send you a spreadsheet that shows you how this would work for a studio of your size. It’s a win-win-win proposition for you, your studio, your teachers, and your students.

In a future post, I will lay out a financial case for top-flight remixes for top-flight competition groups.