Tag Archives: popular

Song selections courtesy of Your Daily Dance

Your Daily DanceYour Daily Dance is a web site devoted to all things dance, and features dance tips, techniques, and resources, delivered nearly daily. (Phew! That’s a lot of work!) Your Daily Dance is the creation of Angie, a dance mom who now has a daughter in dance, and is a dancer herself.

One of the neat features of Your Daily Dance is that Angie has assembled a panel of experienced dance teachers, and when readers submit their questions, these experts offer their advice and insight. Samples of this type of Q & A can be found here in Getting More Height for Your Leaps and here in Mastering More Than a Double Turn.

Your Daily Dance also offers a very wide listing of song selections for all types of dance. You can subscribe to Your Daily Dance’s newsletter to keep the fresh music ideas flowing to your inbox.

Because Angie has her pulse on what’s hot in the dance music world, and keeps lists of songs that are off the beaten path, I asked her to send a selection of songs my way. I have edited these songs to typical dance routine lengths that are used for competitions, recitals, and talent shows, and made them available in Squirrel Trench’s Legitmix catalog, both individually and as an album. This fun collection of songs covers a variety of dance styles, including jazz, tap, lyrical, contemporary, and hip hop. While many edited songs in the Squirrel Trench Legitmix catalog are $9.99, most of the songs in this collection are being offered at the special price of only $4.99. And if you can use most or all of the songs in this special Your Daily Dance album for November of 2014, you can get buy all 8 of them (plus two variations) for only $24.95. That is a savings of more than 50% compared to buying them individually. There’s likely no better bargain in top-notch songs that are ready to be choreographed.

Get more Squirrel Trench remixes at Legitmix

For those new to Legitmix: The way it works is that when you want to purchase an edited or remixed song, Legitmix checks to see if you already own the original song(s) in your iTunes purchased list. If you already own it, you only pay for the edited or remixed song in your shopping cart. If you don’t already own the original song in iTunes, you have the opportunity to buy that too, at the normal iTunes cost (usually between $0.69 and $1.29). For more on how it works, you can watch this video, or go to the Legitmix site.

Take a listen and take them home if they are what you’ve been looking for! Feel free to leave any feedback in the comments below as well.

Fresh interpretations of Stairway to Heaven

Song choice for a dance routine is often undertaken with the greatest of care. The song instantly sets the mood for choreography that accompanies it. Many dancers enjoy dancing with songs that they are already familiar with, and thus popular songs are often a great choice for dance.

While Led Zepplin’s Stairway to Heaven is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest rock and roll songs ever written and recorded, it is also one of the most over-played songs of all time as well. Kind of like what the Mona Lisa is to paintings. We’ve seen the Mona Lisa reproduced thousands of times, and we’ve heard Led Zepplin’s Stairway to Heaven thousands of times.

So if you are considering Stairway to Heaven for dance song choice, a wonderful route to take is a cover version of the song. In a competitive environment, this can do wonders for making the music, and thus the routine, feel fresh, new, and exciting, while still using a popular song. Here are three fantastic and fresh alternatives to Led Zepplin’s original version:

Stairway to Rock version (featuring a wonderfully funky beat)

Rose Reiter version (very moody and intense)

The Insurgency version (female singer)

Enjoy! And as always, if you need one of these songs, or any other, cut, edited, or remixed for a dance routine, shoot me an email.

Deep Cuts

Ever been to a dance competition, only to discover that another studio is using the exact same song as one of your dancers? Well, it’s only natural, because what is currently popular is popular all around the country at the same time.

What should you do? Don’t fall victim to the over-popular trap. While your dance students might be excited to do a routine to Lady Gaga’s Pokerface, the judges eyes’ will glaze over when they hear it for the fourth time in the same day, making it harder for them to give YOUR student’s routine the attention it deserves. The judges have a long enough day as it is.

The answer is to find deeper cuts. It’s even okay to use a popular artist, but don’t use the most popular songs. Find the ones that aren’t overplayed and use one of them instead. Or find another artist who employs the same style, but is less well known.

As I come across songs overused in dance competitions, I will post them, along with their antidotes, here. I feel this is such an important part of selecting a song for dance routines that I have created a page called Antidotes, which you can see at the top of this page. Here are the first two Tired Songs, along with their Inspired antidotes:

Tired:
Jai Ho (You are my Destiny) – From the motion picture Slumdog Millionaire, by A.R. Rahman, Sukhvinder Singh, Tanvi Shah, Mahalaxmi Iyer & Vijay Prakash (other versions include the Pussycat Dolls)
Inspired:
Chhod Na Re (Remix) – Vishal and Anand Raaj Anand

Tired:
Pokerface – Lady Gaga
Inspired:
Sexy Chick – D. Ghetto

Feel free to submit your antidotes in the comments, and I’ll add them to the Antidote page!

Also, I have started a library of song ideas, grouped into dance categories. Check out the Song Suggestions in the menu at the top of the page for some inspiration!