Tag Archives: chorus

Retaining song structure in music editing & remixing

If you edit, cut or remix music for dance, gymnastics, figure skaters, vocalists or any other purpose, this is perhaps the most important article you can read on the subject.

What’s the Plan, Stan?

Most music has a structure… a road map that that takes the listener on a journey from point A to point B with several interesting stops along the way. While music is auditory, if you were to visualize the journey by breaking a song down into its component pieces, you would see something like this:

While many songs have variations on this theme, this graph is nonetheless a useful starting point in visualizing or understanding the structure of a song, including intro, verses (purple), choruses (blue), and almost always some type of bridge section (green).

Music editors who don’t pay attention to the structure of music typically make the minimum number of edits, or cuts, to get the music down from, say, four minutes, to the required routine length, which is usually three minutes, two and a half minutes, or two minutes. What usually ends up happening is that a fade-out is thrown onto music wherever the time limit occurs. If you were to visualize the resulting song structure, you’d see something like this:

While there is nothing “wrong” with this picture per se, it does not have as powerful an impact as the original song. It doesn’t feel complete, and the overall “shape” of the journey is now lacking.

In addition, we’ve now lost the bridge entirely. The variety from the original song is gone. Musically speaking, the bridge is often the most interesting part of the song and the emotional peak of intensity is often in the bridge.

When the structure is “chopped off” as shown above, instead of visiting three different regions, we’ve now visited the same two regions two times. This type of repetition does not lend itself well to the linear nature of dance choreography. The other problem with this edit is that we’ve also lost the ending. The audience is left hanging because the routine never reaches a conclusion.

So in order to maximize artistic integrity of the song AND meet the linear requirements of dance choreography, music should be edited and remixed in order to retain the maximum amount of interest in moving from point A to point B, taking the audience on a journey, stopping off at scenic points of interest along the way, before finally ending up at the destination.

In almost all cases, retaining the bridge section of a song improves the result of the song editing process. This is because in dance choreography, there are rarely repeated movements. In dance choreography, there is almost always a linear progression that evolves from the beginning to end of a routine, without the repeating verse/chorus/verse/chorus patterns you find in music. Most dance routines consist of a linear series of moves that flow, one after another after another.

A song will match up better with dance choreography if it “keeps moving” from one musical idea to the next. Instead of chopping down a song as if it were a tree, giving it a verse/chorus/verse/chorus pattern, you give yourself, as dance choreographer, more musical variety and movement if you edit the song to follow a verse/chorus/bridge/chorus format.

Here is the same song structure as the first graph, but edited to retain the integrity of the original, including the bridge. Note how the shape of emotional intensity is still a journey that builds up, goes over the mountain top of the bridge, before finally coming to rest with the closing chorus and ending:

Note that the intro has been shortened, as has the final chorus. In this chart, I’ve indicated Chorus 1 and 2 as combined; there are many ways to handle this depending on the nature of the song’s chorus arrangement.

By understanding a song’s structure and retaining the overall feel and variety of it, you can make a remix or edit of that song and still leave the audience feeling satisfied with the journey, even though the trip took less time.

If you are a dance choreographer looking to give your students the best music possible for the choreography you are going to teach them, have your music remixed by a professional ahead of time so that he or she can retain the structure. While I am happy to “smooth” out choppy or incorrectly timed edits, even after the routine has already been rehearsed, you’ll be giving your students the best music and routine possible if you start with a solid musical foundation, and that means getting the structure right, from the beginning.

If you prefer to have a professional edit or remix your music, here’s my Request Form.

Also see: How To Avoid Awkward Fadeouts for another article on this subject, complete with sample edited waveforms.

You Should Be Dancing (and not fading out)

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.

Tips for improving your dance music

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.

Basics of music editing

We understand that not every dance routine needs to have the song professionally edited. Personal computers have put audio editing tools within reach of everyone. But even with great tools, unless you really understand what you’re doing, it’s easy to botch the music up when cutting down the music to dance routine length. I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve been at competition and heard a squirrel trench (a scar on the music)- taking not only the audience out of the moment, but also the judges.

So here are some things to keep in mind when editing music so that you don’t leave a big ole flub on an otherwise great song.

First: Really listen to, and understand the song all the way through. Understand the parts that make up the song: intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, ending is the most common song structure. There are certain parts of a song where the performance is almost exactly the same every time it occurs: this is most often true of the chorus of the song, so one of the easiest edits to make is to remove the second verse out of a song. Line up the 1st and 2nd chorus so they are overlapping exactly, and make your edit. This way, you leave the bridge intact, which gives the song (and therefore the dance) more interest over the course of the routine.

Also, watch out for exactly how you make the edit. Many folks try to make a long smooth edit… where one part of the song fades out for a few seconds while the other part of the song fades up for a few seconds. This is usually a mistake and sounds funny (unless there isn’t much going on instrumentally), and can even cause distortion. Better to make a very clean and crisp edit, where one part of the song ends very nearly abruptly while the other part of the song begins nearly abruptly. I usually employ an ultra-ultra-quick crossfade at the edit point, but it happens so quickly (usually a few milliseconds), that you can’t tell that it’s there. The important thing is to line up the beats (and the measures) at the edit point. This brings up another part of successful music editing- make sure you have full measures lined up. Dancers count in 8s… which is usually two measures of 4/4 time. I’ve heard plenty of songs where the edit is in a funny spot and the measures don’t line up.. which produces an “extra” two or three beats, which always sounds unnatural.

Well, that’s all the tips for now. I’ve got more that I’ve developed as a professional musician and music editor, but I’ll post about other techniques later. Here is how to avoid awkward fade-outs, and here are the other Top 5 music editing mistakes heard in competition.

Now that we’re about to enter competition season, take a listen to the songs you’re using for your dancers. If you notice that any of the songs you’ve edited have a squirrel trench or two in them or a funny beginning or ending, send it my way, and I’ll see if I can fix it up for you, retaining the original timing (or as close as possible) so that you don’t have to re-choreograph! My email is: morriss@squirreltrenchaudio.com. Or check out the Services link in the header of this site.

Best wishes for a successful competition season!
~Morriss Partee
Squirrel Trench Audio