An introduction to Squirrel Trench Audio. This video segment covers why it’s important for dance teachers and dance studio owners to edit your dance music correctly from the start!
If you are new to Squirrel Trench Audio, or music editing, here are some links to what you can find here on the web site:
Let me know if you found this video worthwhile, and what music editing tips you’d like to learn about in future video segments. Your feedback is appreciated!
An article I wrote about adjusting the tempo of songs to fit your dancers for Dance Advantage was published today. Check it out, and use this technique to ensure that all of your songs are at the ideal tempos for your dancers!
Earlier today, a new reader of this site posed an excellent question in a comment on my post about the Top 5 Song Editing Mistakes I hear in dance competitions and recitals. So I thought I’d share the question along with my response:
Question: Hi! I just discovered your blog & I really enjoy it. I am a ballroom dance instructor & frequently find myself editing songs for student’s routines. As an instructor, dancer & just someone who loves watching others dance, I also despise the awkward fade out ending as well as the equally as awkward endings that inevitably go with it. Like you said, such a let down for all involved. But what would you suggest if you are using a song that has a natural fade out at the end? I still really would not rather use it even though it is original to the song, but I also don’t want to end up with an abrupt cut from just trying to somehow make my own ending in the music. The song is “You Should Be Dancing” by the Bee Gees in case you’re wondering. I’ve listened to it a million times to try to find somewhere that I could make a graceful ending but to no avail. Thanks in advance for sharing your professional opinion & again I really enjoy your blog!
Answer: Thank you so much for this question! It’s quite wonderful, and is a problem that many dance instructors face. In a previous blog post, I explained how to shorten a song that already has a solid ending. But indeed, “You Should Be Dancing” and many other great songs are recorded with a fade-out ending. Fortunately, there are several ways to come up with a good solution.
1.) Sometimes, a fade out in the music is okay, especially when it’s intentional. In some instances, a choreographer wants to have the dancers exit the stage as the music fades out, on purpose.
2.) If that’s not an option for the desired choreography, the first thing I’d do is check to see if there is an alternate version of the song by another artist that has a non-fade out ending, and use that instead if it exists. (Here’s a sultry bossa nova instrumental version! HOTT!)
3.) Find a live recording by the original artist. In a live setting, it’s extremely difficult to pull off a natural sounding fade out, so usually the musicians create a different ending for live performances. The Bee Gees have indeed recorded several live versions of You Should Be Dancing, Here’s one of them, on YouTube, but there are others you can find on iTunes.
4.) See if you can find a remix version of the song, and either use the remix version, or see if you can splice the remix ending onto the original song’s ending. There are several remixes of You Should Be Dancing on iTunes. Here’s one, and here’s another.
If there is no cover version, live version, or existing remix version of the song with a non-fadeout ending, or if you have your heart really set on using the original version of the song that has the fade out ending, here are some audio editing techniques you can try yourself. Some of these methods are advanced, and that is where you would want to utilize the services of a professional music editor such as myself, or someone else, because there may be no way to make it sound natural with just a cut:
5.) See if there is a way to use a part of the intro to create the ending. In this case, the intro starts out with a basic bass/kick drum pulse with some other light percussion. With some creative editing and some reverb, this could be the route to creating a natural sounding ending.
6.) One of the reasons why it never sounds natural to “chop off” the music using a basic audio editor is that most instruments in a recording have reverb. This is the natural “echo-y” sound of a room. Even if you are not consciously aware of reverb, it exists in every room, and is one way we can tell if we are in a big room or a small room even with our eyes closed. (A big room has more, longer reverb as the sound travels away from a source, bounces off the walls, and reflects back to our ears.) When editing music, adding just the right amount of reverb (using both the correct room size and amount of reverb) can go a long way in making an audio cut sound natural and not chopped.
7.) There are various audio gimmicks that could be employed to create an ending. It’s a little gimmick-y, but you could use a loud “slam” or “thud” sound, with a healthy dose of reverb, at the ending point of the song.
One of the reasons that it’s really hard to find an ending point in this particular song is that we have the phrase “You should be” as a pick-up to the downbeat of “Dancing, yeah” repeating constantly as the song fades out. The downbeat is on the first syllable of “dancing”, so it will always sound unnatural to try to make an ending that results in “you should be dan”.
So the bottom line is that it can be done, but it requires a bit more than just a simple cut to make it sound smooth and natural.
Today, this site received several hits from people searching for “dance competition length songs.” So perhaps a bit of explanation is needed if you are new to the world of dance competitions.
Most dance competitions have a time limit for routines. For most studios and competitions, the maximum length is three minutes exactly. However, other studios or competitions might have a 2:30-minute time maximum, and some recitals have a two-minute duration maximum.
So how do you find great dance songs for competition if most songs are 3:30 or longer? How is it that Lady Gaga’s Pokerface is 3:57, yet this song has been used by countless competition dancers?
The answer is in editing. A skillful music editor can cut parts out of a song, and make it seamless to the listener by using a few professional skills. A good music editor can do this by understanding and analyzing song structure, making edits at zero-crossing points, using crossfades, and adding reverb where necessary. Sometimes a verse and/or chorus can be cut out, other times a long intro can be shortened. In still other cases, repeated sections can be cut out. Sometimes all of these things need to be performed in order to make the song optimal for a dance routine. Knowing EXACTLY where and when to cut out parts of a song is a skill that takes years of music knowledge and experience to do well.
So the next time you hear a song that would be fantastic for your next competition routine, but find out that the song is four minutes long, don’t despair! Just let me know what song you want, and I will edit it down to competition length for you! Check out my services here.
If you limit your song choices to only songs that are less than three minutes long, you are limiting yourself to a tiny fraction of the great songs that can be used for dance! So don’t make your choice based on the length of the song. Choose the song you want, and then have a professional edit it to the right length for the dance routine.
It’s been somewhat of a gradual process, but the average volume pressed on CDs has gotten louder and louder over the past 20 years. The casual listener might think this is a good thing, but it actually is not. Because people perceive something to “sound better” when played at a higher volume than the same thing played softly, commercial and other interests have driven what is called the “Loudness Wars“, i.e. the attempt to create CDs that are just a little bit louder than other CDs.
However, there is an upper ceiling to the volume of the music that is recorded to CD. Beyond this maximum level is distortion or noise. So mastering and mixing engineers employ the techniques of compression and limiting to get the perceived volume louder. But there IS a downside to compression, and that is the squishing or flattening of the music. Untrained ears can’t readily identify compression, but if you ever get the chance to go to a recording studio, or even experiment with a compressor on your home computer (through good speakers of course), you can learn to hear the effect of compression on music (a little bit or a severe amount). Listening to severely compressed music for more than a few minutes is also fatiguing on the ears. Our brains “expect” to hear sounds with dynamics.
Loudness and compression “works” for electronic styles of dance music and some other types of modern electronic music. Quality of sound is not the main concern, just a thumping bass and maximum volume.
When creating remixes for dance competition, you naturally want your songs and remixes to be as loud as all of the others. It feels awkward to have your song come onto the sound system at a volume much lower than the song before and the song after.
But you CAN take the loudness war too far in the dance competition world. My girlfriend chose a modern version of the jazz standard “It Don’t Mean A Thing” for one of her soloists this season. The version she chose is by the Charlotte Swing Band. While this is a fantastic and exciting Big Band version of the song, this recording has been squashed to within an inch of its life in the attempt to get it as loud as possible on the CD.
Just last month, I witnessed something notable at a regional dance competition. I watched as the sound engineer reached for his volume control and TURN DOWN THE MAINS to the house sound system when this song started playing. He had not done so for any other song prior to it that day that I was aware of. Amazing to have witnessed the sound engineer do that since overall, the SPL (sound pressure level) to the house at the competition was quite high (loud) for the room.
Witnessing the sound engineer turn down the volume for this song has really stuck with me. While you want your songs to sound loud, there is a point at which trying to get it still louder will come back to bite you as it did here. I actually have since remixed this song for future competitions to bring the volume slightly lower than originally printed in the iTunes version. I also rolled off some of the very low end and some of the very high end, to try to bring it back to a more “normal” level. However, I can’t uncompress what has already been compressed. The compression level is so severe, it sounds as if it was being played through a television set. With a lot of brass, this severe compression gives the music a quality of something like what you would hear the Tonight Show band playing. Perhaps that’s what the mix and mastering engineers were going for.
Add me to the list of mix engineers who would like to see a return to lower volumes printed onto CDs (such as the K-meter system) so that the volume resides in the LISTENER’s control. If you want a song louder, don’t demand a louder CD, turn up the volume knob on YOUR system.
If you’ve got a song for dance competition that was recorded years and years ago, and you want to get it up to today’s normal loudness level, I can do that for you with professional results. Feel free to contact me for more information about that.
Here’s a great guide posted on YouTube that explains this phenomenon so that you can both hear and see what’s going on:
With the proliferation of free and cheap audio editing software, many dance studios have taken it upon themselves to handle the editing of their dance music. While it is certainly better to edit a song yourself than to not edit it at all, a top-notch dance studio may want to consider having their songs professionally edited.
Why would a dance studio have their music professionally edited?
Teachers and students at a quality dance studio spend hours upon hours perfecting their dances for recital, competition and other performances. Students practice all of their routines in class and at home. Every nuance, every detail of motion is perfected and cleaned up. Every detail, from how the dancers enter to how they exit the stage is choreographed for optimum audience enjoyment and professional presentation. The same is true for costumes and makeup. The details of the appearance are examined and refined.
So if a dance studio is spending countless hours and dollars to ensure every aspect of the dancers’ movement and appearance is the best it can possibly be, why wouldn’t they also want to ensure that the music, the foundation for every dance performance, is also as great as it can be? Why use music for performance that has glitches, awkward fade-outs, mismatched beats, frozen statue intros, abrupt jumps and other scars when seamless music can be created by a skilled music editor?
What does professional music editing for dance entail?
Some people think that dance editing is simply employed to remove swear words or other inappropriate lyrics from a song. But editing music well is much more than than, and certainly much more than fading a song out at the desired length of the routine. In fact, 90% of the time fading the music out at the desired length for the routine is at an awkward point in the song, leading to the most common music editing mistake heard at dance competitions. In this blog post I explain exactly how to avoid awkward fade-outs. (Here are the other Top 5 mistakes made in dance music editing.)
A skilled music editor, who understands what dancers need in a competition or recital-length routine, does a lot more than simply a fade a song out or edit out swear words. A skilled song editor analyzes a song for its structure, and then determines how that structure can be changed, sliced, or rearranged in order produce a new song that makes sense from beginning to end. Usually this involves shortening an intro, removing a verse and/or a chorus, shortening instrumental solos, and so on. This process is something that requires a great deal of skill and experience, in both music and audio editing, to execute flawlessly.
Skilled audio mix engineers not only rearrange the structure of an existing piece of music, they can perform quite a number of other audio engineering techniques such as changing the equalization of the music to better fit the dancer, speed up or slow down all or parts of a song without changing the pitch, add reverb to edit points or endings where it makes sense, and even increase the volume (slightly) of older recordings without causing clipping distortion.
The sad but unfortunate fact is that many dance teachers don’t even realize that they utilizing music with poor edits in their routines. Dance teachers are trained in the visual arts, and are experts at choreography and movement. Few are also exceptionally well-versed in music structure or audio editing. Therefore, dance studios would enhance the quality of their performance by utilizing the services of an experienced music editor to handle the process of editing songs to the right length for dance numbers.
As I mentioned before, it’s not too late to have a song with a music hiccup or glitch fixed in time for Nationals. In fact, I’ve just finished repairing a song like that right now… the dance routine is SPECTACULAR, winning Platinum and 2nd overall, and the music is by a well-known artist who hit the scene in the 80s. The song, as edited by the student, was wonderful all the way up until the very end when there was a fade out, followed by an abrupt jump into the last few notes. But have no fear, Squirrel Trench Audio now has the ending smooth and flawless! And since the routine has already been choreographed, I kept all aspects of the song identical to the original edit, except for the newly perfected ending. If you are cleaning up your dance moves after regionals, going into nationals, it makes sense to clean up your music too!
With the proliferation of CD-burners in laptops and personal computers these days, you might be tempted to buy cheap store-brand blank CDs (CD-Rs) to burn your music on. This is a big mistake. DO NOT DO IT. When you are at competition, the LAST thing you want is to have all your dancers take the stage, assume their starting positions, and then…… nothing (except silence). The announcer has to say “sorry, we’re having technical difficulties with your song”, the dancer(s) shuffle off stage, and the search for the back-up CD is on, all because the cheap, off-brand CD-R was unreadable.
Instead, ONLY BUY NAME BRAND CD-Rs like Sony, Maxell, Verbatim, TDK, Philips and Memorex. There is another brand you’ve never heard of, that sells extremely high quality CD-Rs, and that is Tayio Yuden. Many professional music studios use this brand.
The difference in price between off-brand CD-Rs and name brand is about $8 (or less) per spindle of 50. In this tight economy, we all like a good bargain, but this works out to 15¢ per CD! It’s just not worth messing up your student at competition for this amount of pocket change. Save money elsewhere, but there’s no excuse to be cheap here when your student’s performance readiness is on the line.
Once you have purchased your spindle of blank CDs, don’t subject the spindle to too much vibration and movement. There is a possibility that the CD-Rs will rub on each other, causing scratches. CD-Rs are much more delicate than manufactured or “pressed” CDs, so you always want to handle them with extreme care. Always keep them in a sleeve or case after you’ve burned music on them, and always keep them on the spindle before writing them.
When burning your CDs, make sure the Verify option is selected. Also always test the CD in any ordinary CD player to makes sure you have a good, ready-to-play disc.
Another tip for burning good CDs: Don’t use the maximum speed setting possible. I find that I get fewer failed CD burns if I use a lower speed setting. Many CD burners can do 24x or higher, but I stick with an 8x write speed.
CD burning checklist:
Start with a name-brand CD-R
When burning, make sure Verify is on
When burning, use 8x or slower speed
TEST your burned CD in a regular CD player
Keep your burned CD safe in a sleeve or case and out of direct sunlight
Always make a back-up CD of your music and bring that too
If you follow these six guidelines, your music is COMPETITION READY!
Here’s an article on Dance Moms with Tips for improving your dance music. Some of the ideas contained in it are a little dated (when was the last time you ever played music off a cassette?), but the premise is a solid one. Your dance students are paying hundreds of dollars and putting in countless hours of rehearsal, so why would you short change them by giving them anything less than stellar music to work with? It’s like building a two-story house on top of sand. The music is the foundation of dance, start with a rock solid foundation that goes down to bedrock!
We here at Squirrel Trench Audio take pride in delivering songs that are edited perfectly, optimized in a variety of ways to be the best they can be for competition! Here are just a few of the things we take into account when editing songs for dancers: Short but sweet intro, overall song structure and integrity, solid ending, buttery smooth & seamless edits, maximizing vocal verses so dancers can easily tell where they are in the song, while retaining bridges for maximum dynamic interest, and making sure the eq and dynamic range of the recording will translate well on all sound systems.
Earlier this week, I wrote about the Top 5 music editing mistakes heard in dance competitions, and promised you additional blog posts about how you can avoid making them.
Number One on the list is the AWKWARD FADE OUT.
As I mentioned in that earlier blog post, it’s easy to understand why this is the most common music editing mistake. Dance teachers are very busy, and most are not expert musicians in addition to being expert dance teachers. With music editing software now available for free on all platforms, the quickest and easiest thing to do is to simply fade the music out at the desired time in the song.
However, this often leads to disappointment for the dancer on stage. Let’s examine why before exploring the best methods to prevent this faux pas from occurring.
A good song, just like a good dance routine, has a structure. In the most simple terms, songs have an intro, a middle, and an ending. Unless a song fades out in the recording, the ending is designed so that the listener can tell that the end is approaching, and then it finishes in a satisfying way. Musicians who perform on stage like to deliver a good ending, because then the audience knows when to clap, and what performer doesn’t enjoy applause? (For more on dance structure, check out this article in Dance Spirit Magazine.)
It’s no different when the performer is a dancer instead of a musician. A good dance will have an intro, a middle, and an ending, and it should coincide with the beginning, middle, and ending of the music. That way, the audience can tell when the dance is over, and applaud accordingly. When the music fades out at an awkward point in the song, and the dancer holds his/her finishing pose (or starts shuffling off the stage), the audience is left hanging, and is silent for a few seconds before they realize that the dance has ended. This awkward silence makes the performer feel like he/she hasn’t done a good job, no matter how loudly the audience applauds after the silence (or even worse, after the dancer has exited the stage).
The good news: if the song you have chosen has a good ending, it’s a piece of cake to edit the song properly and deliver what the audience and performer deserve: a solid, great ending to a great performance.
As an example, let’s use Jason Mraz’s The Dynamo of Volition from the album We Sing, We Dance, We Steal Things. It’s catchy, and has a great dance beat. The song as recorded is 3:36, much too long for dance competition. However, with a single well-placed edit, this song can be made 2:23, a perfect length for competition, and still retain the song’s original solid ending as well as retain a good overall structure.
If you were to fade the song out at 2:23, it would be right in the middle of a verse, creating the MOST awkward type of ending, which can’t even be considered a real ending.
In order to understand how it is possible to retain the song’s structure and still reduce it from 3:36 to 2:23, and make it sound perfect, we need to understand the song’s original structure. This song is a bit unusual in that there is no intro; Mraz starts right in on the verse.
Here are the parts of the song:
0:00 – Verse A
0:27 – Chorus
0:44 – Verse B
1:08 – Verse A
1:29 – Chorus
1:49 – Bridge
2:04 – Verse B (with extension)
2:43 – Chorus with ending
If we map this song out with parts, assigning each part a letter of the alphabet, along with a number in order of appearance, it would look like this:
A1 | C1 | B1 | A2 | C2 | D1 | B2 | C3
The easiest way to shorten it is to make a cut right before the last chorus, move the last chorus with ending to a new track, and then shift it in time so that the last chorus now overlaps with the second chorus.
In letter form, our song is now on two tracks, and it looks like this:
Track 1: A1 | C1 | B1 | A2 | C2
Track 2: C3
You can see that the 3rd (last) Chorus, with ending, now overlaps with the 2nd Chorus. Zoom in on the audio wave forms, and make sure that these two different audio tracks are matched up to each other perfectly in time. Play both tracks simultaneously, and move the new track so that you don’t hear any echo caused by having the two tracks out of alignment.
Once you have C3 in exact alignment with C2 timing-wise, there is only one more step to make: and that is to make a sharp, but smooth, transition at some point from C2 to C3, and voilá, you now have a perfect 2:23 version of The Dynamo of Volition! Your audio tracks will look something like this now:
When looking for the point to make the transition from one audio segment to another, what you want to find is what is called a zero-crossing point. This is where the audio wave is “standing still.” Making the edit at a zero-crossing for both audio waves is the best way to ensure you don’t get an abrupt cut in the music at the edit point.
It takes a few minutes longer to listen to a song, analyze where the verses, chorus, and bridges are, then to just fade it out, but the rewards are substantial for you and your dancer in the applause generated by the audience, and the feeling of closure at the end of a great performance. The ending is the last impression left with the judges, so make it strong instead of fading away!
Here is a video where I show you how to retain the ending:
If any of this is too overwhelming for you, feel free to send your song our way, and we’ll get it done for you! We love making perfect song edits for dancers!
I just got back from a spectacular regional dance competition, where my original remix Pixie Hollow premiered. The dancers were truly spectacular and brought a tear to my eye. I can’t wait to see them perform it again in two weeks.
It was truly a pleasure to watch so many fantastic dances, and hear the wonderful music that the dance teachers had chosen for their students. I could see how much hard work had gone into each number to bring it to fruition on stage.
Being a musician and not a dancer, I paid special attention to the music, and how the dance and music worked together in the performances. I was very happy to hear no major squirrel trenches in any of the songs I heard. However, I couldn’t also help but notice that there were minor glitches in the music editing of many songs. So in my quest to help eliminate bad music edits from all dance competitions, I present to you the top 5 music editing mistakes I hear in songs played at competition. In subsequent posts, I will explain in detail how you can avoid each one. While most judges won’t deduct points for these mistakes, any one of them takes away from the musicality of the dance that you are striving for. Any of these mistakes takes attention away from the dancer and makes the performance less enjoyable to watch.
Let’s discuss the first two in a bit more detail. Again, future blog posts will explain more about each one of these pitfalls, and more importantly, exactly how to avoid them in your own music editing.
The awkward fade out (and its cousin, the abrupt ending) is by far the most common music editing mistake I hear in dance competitions. It’s easy to understand why it happens. You find a great song, and virtually all popular songs are too long for competition. So what is the easiest thing for a time-pressed dance teacher to do? Fade it out at the proper length for competition. But while it’s easy to do this, it’s very much worth the time to avoid this practice. With the awkward fade out, your dancer is usually left either holding their ending pose or begins to exit the stage, while the auditorium falls into silence. The audience doesn’t start applauding and cheering because they aren’t sure that the performance has actually ended. There’s nothing worse for your performers’ self-confidence than the nervous silence, followed by the too-late applause created by the awkward fade out. Often these strange fade-outs occur in middle of a verse or some other equally unexpected point in the song. As I’ve said in an earlier blog post, if your song has a clear ending, use it. [Update: Here’s exactly how to do it.]
The mis-matched phrase edit is another common song editing mistake, and one which can be quite problematic from a dance point of view. Most dancers love a strong groove, a catchy or funky beat, that propels them to dance. And most dance music (though certainly not all) is in 4/4 time. Dancers learn to count in 8s, which corresponds very nicely to most musical phrasing, which usually occurs in groups of 4-beat measures. While musicians learn to count in 4s, these groups of measures often occur in even multiples, such as 8 and 16, and these patterns usually can also be lumped together in groups of 24 and even 32. How strange then, when the editing of music occurs in mid-measure, and sometimes even in mid-beat. Here is what this pattern looks like in written form, from a dancer’s point of view:
No wonder your dancers are having a hard time with this section of their song- it not only has an odd number of beats, it also has a partial beat! OUCH! It’s nearly impossible to get your dancers’ moves clean when the music itself is not clean in this way. Inevitably, this type of editing flub kills the groove and pulse of the music.
Well, that’s all for this blog post. In future posts, I will give you some very specific guidance on how to avoid these most-common song editing mistakes in your competition routines. In the meantime, if you have a song that has one of these mistakes in it, and you want it fixed in time for your next regional or nation competition, send me an email.
