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Guest, Jason Marquette returns with more tips as you prepare music for recitals and competition.

Last time, I went over how to select the right song for your dancers and gave tips on how to edit it yourself. Choosing the right sections of a song so that it provides significant variety in musicality keeps your work fresh and your ideas flowing. It creates an arc to follow through the piece.  The problem is whether or not all of those sections fit seamlessly together.

Many teachers don’t consider is how important good music editing is to the choreographic, creative process.

Good editing ensures the content of the song makes sense and that the musical progression is seamless allowing you to keep your choreographic inspiration flowing.  It also increases the enjoyment for your audience. Nothing is more jarring then watching a beautiful lyrical or contemporary piece and having the music jump in the middle of a phrase. In competitive situations, it subconsciously lowers the quality of the piece in the eyes of the adjudicators.

Remember When…?

I don’t want to age myself…but I’m gonna. I was teaching back when music editing had to be done on cassette decks. We would record from CD to cassette and then sit on the pause button to get the perfect edit. I was probably one of the pickier people out there so I wound up spending hours editing just a few songs. Unless you wanted to open up the cassette and cut and splice for overlay and mixing, it was a cut and paste process.

Obviously technology has made this easier.  Now I can edit up to 10 reasonably challenging songs in just a couple of hours. In a day, I can do upwards of 40. Music editing isn’t super difficult, but it can be time consuming to get just the right edit.

Save Yourself Time, Money, & Frustration

There are services out there geared specifically toward editing music for dance studios, gyms, ice skaters etc, however, they can be expensive and, you are at the mercy of their schedule and talents.

If you use one of these services, (…)