Tag Archives: sound

Wizard of Oz Remix is big hit

Just got a link to a video from Kim Houli, dance studio owner of Dance for Joy in Brielle, NJ. This is a video of the opening recital production number for which I did the music remix last fall. It was truly a pleasure to make this music, and an honor to provide the foundation for what Kim says was their biggest recital opening hit to date.

Enjoy the hard work of these fabulous dancers!

And now, you too can purchase and use this remix, thanks to a new service called Legitmix. Preview and purchase this mix here:

Get more Squirrel Trench remixes at Legitmix

Curfew by Snowmine

Crank this song up if you have a good sound system connected to your computer:

This song comes from the Weathervane/Shaking Through project; independent musicians and bands are tracked, and then the stems are raw tracks are uploaded for anyone to download and mix. This band is called Snowmine; fronted by lead singer and keyboardist Grayson Sanders. Produced by Brian McTear and Tracked/Engineered by Jonathan Low. You can find more about this song, band and project here: http://www.shakingthrough.com/snowmine

This sound file above is my original mix of this excellent song. I’ve had a bit of fun changing a few of the elements up a bit, but I’ve also tried to stay true to what I imagine the band’s vision for the track is, and let their musicianship shine through.

The next “prop” your dance studio needs

Have you ever noticed how hard it is to hear clearly in your studio’s rehearsal space? As a teacher, are you constantly having to yell to be heard above the music? There is a reason for that: most dance studios’ acoustic characteristics are about as bad as they can possibly be. Because all the walls are parallel (floor and ceiling of course too), and one or more walls are covered entirely with mirrors and windows, sound bounces around and around and around and around. This bouncing is known as echo or reverb. Often these types of spaces have severe flutter echoes.

The net effect of all this sound-bouncing (reverb and echo) is that it makes it hard to hear things inside the room clearly. And when you can’t hear clearly, it makes you want to turn the volume of the music up much too loud. It makes you have to yell in order for the kids to hear you, and even then, it can be hard for them to understand what you are saying, and also hard to hear the details of the music you are playing.

This is ESPECIALLY PROBLEMATIC FOR TAPPERS! Not only are tap shoes loud to begin with, but flutter echoes and loads of reverb make it really hard to hear the details and timing that your tappers are trying to achieve! No wonder that your tap students are having such a hard time trying to get in sync with each other…. they can’t hear what they are doing!

Another downside to the terrible acoustics inside your dance rehearsal spaces is that by cranking up the music to try to hear it better, you are annoying your neighbors, whether they are other businesses or other dance rehearsal spaces. If it’s another dance teacher in the next room, then they have to turn their music up to drown out yours… leading you to turn up your music even louder to drown out theirs, in a never-ending loudness war.

It’s time to stop the loudness wars in your own dance studio! It’s time to start hearing the music and the instructor more clearly inside the the studio space! It’s time to stop going home at the end of a long night of teaching with a headache and your ears ringing!

Fortunately, solutions are EASY and relatively inexpensive! But the difference, from a sonic perspective, is NIGHT and DAY!

Many dance studios have a cadre of talented and able-bodied Dance Dads who build amazing props for their dance daughters and dance sons. These heroic dads (and of course moms too!) then also have the job of carting said props long distances to various regional and national competitions.

Well, the next “prop” your studio’s dance dads should build is …. drum roll….. broadband acoustic absorbing panels.

Yes, you heard me right. For a total of about $150-$200 in materials, your handy dance dads (and moms!) can build six or eight 2′ by 4′ acoustic panels and hang them in your rehearsal spaces, bringing down the amount of flutter echoes and reverb to a reasonable and comfortable level. The result of which will be:

  1. You can hear the music CLEARLY at a comfortable volume
  2. You don’t have to yell as loud to be heard by your students
  3. Students can more easily hear the instructions you are giving them
  4. You don’t leave the studio with a headache every night from the volume of the sound system
  5. You don’t annoy your neighbors with OONCE OONCE OONCE all night long

If you have the budget, you can purchase pre-made acoustic panels and traps, but dance studio owners can save a few bucks by enlisting the help of capable dance parents! More about how to build these acoustic traps coming up soon, so stay tuned! If you can’t wait another minute to find out more, here’s an example of how it looks/works installed in a dance studio: Acoustic panels in a dance studio. Here’s a nice and short little YouTube video that explains quite clearly how to build them. My only advice beyond this video is to use a nice-looking fabric for the face so that you have something beautiful to hang on your walls instead of burlap.

Here is a PDF describing a case study from a dance studio in Sequim, Washington, where the severe echo problems were tamed with acoustic panels. Here is a PDF which gives NRC ratings at several frequencies for 3″ Roxul Safe and Sound (page 7).

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!

Best place for dance teachers to get unique music

I love monitoring the search terms that people are using to find this Squirrel Trench Audio web site. And here’s my new favorite: “best place for dance teachers to get unique music.”

YES! Squirrel Trench Audio IS the best place for dance teachers to get new, original, and unique music. One of my all-time favorite assignments is to take an existing hit, for instance Martin Solveig & Dragonette’s Hello, and give it a new twist that no dance competition judge has ever heard before (I’ve got a spectacular remix of Hello that will premier in competition in March 2012).

The best part is, with a unique Squirrel Trench Remix, there is NO chance that any other dancer will have the same music. Someone else might have the same song, but the Squirrel Trench Remix will be BETTER, and will impress the judges much more since the audio portion of the routine will be unlike anything they’ve heard before. It won’t be the same-old, same-old that they’ve heard on the radio or on stage dozens of times before.

One of the reasons why a Squirrel Trench Remix is better is that most dance songs are looooong so that they get playing time in clubs. I can take the long song and condense it down (retaining the integrity of the musical structure), giving it as much dramatic impact as possible. The Squirrel Trench remix will hold the judge’s ears’ attention while your student(s) holds the judges eyes’ attention with the dance routine.

Not decided on exactly the right song for your dance routine yet? Give me an idea of the age of dancer, type of dance (lyrical, jazz, tap, acro, contemporary, etc.) and the personality of the music you want, and I’ll give you some suggestions.

So if you are a dance teacher, dance parent, or dance studio owner, and you are looking for new, unique remixes, shoot me an email and I’ll create a unique remix just for you!

Clipping distortion

Most of the music at the Headliners Competition in Lowell this weekend so far has sounded really great. However, one song had quite a bit of distortion throughout the entire song. Perhaps it wasn’t enough for the judges to lower the dancer’s marks, but it was still very noticeable and distracting. This distortion sounded like a buzzing coming through the speakers. It was most likely a phenomenon known as clipping distortion.

For folks who are new to audio editing, you might be tempted to “turn it up” once you discover that you can make the song louder in your mixing/editing software than it was originally. This is almost always a BIG MISTAKE. Why? Because there is an upper limit to the volume possible to record in a computer audio file (an mp3, aiff, wav, aac, etc), or on a CD. If you try to make your song go louder than this upper limit, you are simply introducing noise and crackly distortion into your song.

Without getting too far into the technicalities of this maximum level, let’s just say that 90% of the time, raising the volume will result in nasty sounding distortion. The judges have a long enough day as it is without assaulting their ears with this noise.

Older recordings that sound soft or any music which has soft passages CAN be made to sound louder through expertly applied mastering techniques such as upward compression and judicious use of peak limiting, but this is best handled by an audio professional. Too much peak limiting (a form of compression) can result in a squashed sound, leaving your track lifeless, dull and weak; which is exactly the opposite of your intended result of creating a cranked and pounding track.

Bottom line: DO NOT INCREASE THE VOLUME of your songs and tracks when editing them on a computer, unless you are okay with a crackly distorted sound for your music. In most cases, your songs are already as loud as they can go without further professional enhancement. Once you create clipping distortion in an audio file, there is NO WAY to remove it. The only way to get rid of it is to trash the distorted version and go back to the original version.

If you’re using a song that needs its volume goosed up a bit, feel free to email me and I can likely make the track sound louder without causing any clipping distortion. This is especially true if the song is an older song, or even a modern song with passages that are too soft when played over a typical sound system that dancers perform with.

For more on the dangers of trying to get your audio tracks louder, check out: The Losers of the Loudness Wars

If you are looking to get your track louder without suffering clipping distortion, check out my mastering services.