Tag Archives: teacher

Prince tribute for dance studios

Purple-RainIt is with great sadness to learn that the amazing musician and talented artist, Prince, has passed away. For many of us, his music is an integral part of the soundtrack of our lives.

It has been my honor to edit and remix some of his amazing music for dance studios and dance teachers. If you are interested in using a Prince song for a dance routine, here is an edited version of one of his songs that has amazing funk, yet is not very well known. It’s popular with the kids these days to say “Werk it!” but more than 30 years ago, Prince was already singing “Let’s Work!”. Enjoy this edit!

Here is Let’s Go Crazy from the movie Purple Rain. This version has all objectionable lyrics omitted, has been remastered, and edited specifically to be optimized for a jazz or tap dance routine:

And for dance studios interested in a mix that pays homage to “The Purple One”, we are pleased to present this 3 minute mix that includes five of Prince’s more popular hits:

This 4:55 production mix starts with Let’s Go Crazy, and includes Let’s Work:

This 4:45 production mix is similar but starts with Purple Rain:

You can get ALL of these Prince edits and remixes for an amazing bargain price in this album:

Get more Squirrel Trench remixes at Legitmix

Professional studios deserve professional music

It just makes sense…. when you are a professional dance studio with a high caliber of teachers and students, you deserve to have professionally edited music for your competitions and recitals. While certainly the focus of the studio is on dance, it’s pretty hard to dance well to music that is less than professional.

It doesn’t really make sense to ask your dance teachers to edit their own music. Your teachers are experts at choreography, turns, and motivating students to dance their best. It’s unreasonable to also expect them to understand the intricacies of song structure, phrase editing, normalization, beat alignment, zero-crossings of audio wave forms, and reverb, compression and equalization techniques.

But how is a dance studio owner to pay for the expense of professional music editing, when budgets are already extremely tight? Fortunately, there is a way for the studio owner to not only pay for professional music editing, but also make a small profit by providing individualized practice CDs to every single student of the studio. By charging a modest music fee to all students, to cover the cost of editing the songs they are in, plus providing them with an individualized practice CD with all of their group and solo songs, you will cover the music editing expense, the CD burning expense, and have a small profit left over for the studio. The size of the profit will depend on the size of your studio, plus a few other variables such as the total number of different songs your studio has edited for the season. Email me, and I’ll be happy to provide a spreadsheet showing sample income and expense projections for a studio of your particular size.

Wow. Imagine that. Professionally edited music for every song your studio uses in competition and recital, a customized practice CD for each and every one of your students containing all of the songs they are in, and your studio makes a small profit in the process. Win-win-win!

If you are a dance teacher, and you edit your own music, this blog has many tips for doing a more professional job. Start with the Top 5 music editing mistakes heard at competition, along with the cure for the most common one: How to avoid awkward fade-out endings.

Dance teachers on twitter

In addition to remixing music for competitive dance routines, the Squirrel also happens to be an innovator in social media. In my other life, I am the CEO of EverythingCU.com, and online community that was launched in 2001, several years before Facebook was even an idea.

This blog post is the start of a new resource: Dance teachers connecting with each other, and we’ll start with twitter.

If you are a dance teacher, here are two lists of fellow dance teachers:

That’s a total of 166 other dance teachers to communicate with! And that’s just the start!

If you are a dance teacher and you’re not on either of these lists, then by all means, send a tweet directed @danceadvantage and @DancesToGo to ask to be included. Let’s see if we can fill both of these lists with 500 dance teachers across the nation and the world! If you know of any other excellent lists of dance teachers, please write it as a comment!