Below is the introduction for a book I am writing. I would appreciate any and all feedback you might have in the comments. I can be reached via email at: morriss@squirreltrenchaudio.com.

Introduction

Dance is the art of human movement. And while dance can exist without music, most dance is performed with a soundtrack. For more than ten years, I have had the great honor of creating several thousand soundtracks for choreographers around the world, primarily in the United States, but also in Canada, Australia, the U.K., and New Zealand. It’s been my personal mission over that time to ensure that every dancer performs with flawless, beautiful music. Every time I take on a new music editing or mixing project, I give it the same care and attention as if it were my own child performing with it. 

This book is for choreographers, and those who create soundtracks for their routines. Having attended numerous dance competitions and recitals where dance was performed with the soundtracks I created, I have developed an array of techniques for making these soundtracks excellent. My aim is to give you the practical knowledge I’ve gained working with hundreds of choreographers, and studying music and audio engineering, so that you too, can produce flawless music for choreography.

This text focuses on transforming popular songs, which are generally three to four minutes in length, into soundtracks for choreography, which usually range from two to two-and-a-half minutes.  There are two disciplines needed to create flawless song edits for choreography – musicianship and audio engineering. Those two disciplines dovetail with understanding the intersection between music and dance, and the general cues that young dancers rely on to remember the choreography that they learn and perform. 

Music and audio technology have made impressive leaps forward over the past two decades. Fortunately, long gone are the days when choreographers would use two cassette decks to painstakingly align different parts of a song, often using a pencil to try to get it just right. (If you don’t know why a pencil is involved with cassettes, be glad!) What is now primitive technology came with a whole host of limitations. 

Digital audio and personal computer technology makes it so that all of us are within reach of an amazing arsenal of tools to make music for choreo that is flawless. Today’s laptop has more audio processing power at a reasonable price than the million-dollar recording studios built in the 1970s and ‘80s. Recording engineers of that era couldn’t have imagined that eventually we could put entire virtual orchestras inside of a portable computer that is less than ¾” of an inch in thickness. But while audio technology has advanced to the point where it’s relatively easy to shorten songs on a laptop, or even a tablet or smartphone, sometimes there are almost too many choices. For example, what bitrate should an mp3 be saved as? Should I save with constant or variable bit rate encoding, and why am I even being asked this question?

Beyond minor issues like these, I routinely find many errors and glitches in choreo music I receive for repairs or cleaning. And I have also heard far too many routines’ soundtracks played at top volume for competition in civic centers and auditoriums with jarring skips, breaks, and thumps. Such glitches take an audience (including parents and judges) “out of the moment” of enjoying the dance performance, with the worst of them creating difficulties for dancers trying to count the music.

You’ve probably heard these mistakes as well if you have watched other’s dance performances, in music that otherwise flows smoothly. Strangely, while you’ve heard these mistakes in others’ music quite clearly, you may have not heard them in your own music edits — and there is a reason for that.

It’s not that your own music edits don’t have flaws. It’s in the nature of how the brain works, that you are less likely to notice flaws in your own musical creations. When you listen to a piece of music, over and over again, it eventually becomes “normal” to you, even if there are one or more issues readily apparent to anyone else listening to it. This is why good audio engineers need to work fast, or else they too fall into the trap of thinking that what they are hearing is normal or good. 

Trying to hear your music work clearly is known as ‘maintaining perspective.’ There are several ways you can maintain perspective while creating your own music edits. The first way is to know your tools and techniques extremely well, so that you can work swiftly. The faster you work, the better perspective you can maintain. Another method is to take frequent breaks. Yet another method is to “put away” your edits for a couple of days or even a week, ensuring that you don’t listen to them at all. But even this technique won’t work if you’ve already listened to your own edits more than a dozen times.

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Some may question the importance of creating beautiful soundtracks for dance. Does one thump or awkward break in a song really ruin an otherwise beautiful dance performance? That decision is up to every choreographer or dance studio owner. Does a jarring sound break the audiences’ enjoyment of a graceful dancer? Most would answer yes. But in any case, with today’s technology, there is no need for any dancer to ever perform with anything less than flawless music.

Here are a few more reasons I feel every dancer ought to have perfect music to perform with. From a dance studio owner’s self-interested perspective, flawlessly edited music does several things for the studio: It increases the perceived quality and professionalism of the studio, and it also increases the likelihood of student retention. One way it increases those chances  is that a beautifully edited piece of music has less repetition than when a song is simply started from the beginning and then faded-out at the two-minute or two-and-a-half minute mark. We’ve all seen the dancer on stage who performs their solo beautifully for the first two-thirds of the routine, and then suddenly forgets the next move in their choreography, and runs off the stage in embarrassment. While I don’t have a catalog of such ‘forgetting choreo’ moments, I am convinced that some of these occur because the music is so repetitive the dancer loses track of where they are in the song. 

The other way in which flawlessly edited music helps studios retain students is by avoiding the awkward fade-out. When music is faded-out at the routine length, it is an incredible disservice to the dancer. When the music volume starts to drop, that is the dancer’s queue to exit the stage… and usually these fade-outs take the audience by surprise. So that when the music finally is over, the dancer is already in the wings, and only then does the audience start to applaud. This robs the dancer of being center stage to fully receive the audience’s applause that they so richly deserve after all of their hard work. 

But these are the self-interested reasons for a dance studio to utilize nothing but flawless soundtracks for their routines. Other reasons go beyond self-interest. Dance students are impressionable youngsters who are going through the most formative times of their lives. Each dance student will hear their chosen group and solo songs hundreds of times in the course of a season’s rehearsals. This music forms the soundtrack of their lives. For that reason alone, every dancer deserves that music to be as perfect as it can be.