Creating a Freestyle: Music

I'm currently going through the music choosing process for the second time... and I wish it could be the last! Choosing music for a freestyle has proven to be a stressful and time-consuming task. 

The first step is to find your horse's tempo in all 3 gaits. Then it's on to listening to a million soundtracks (mostly browsing youtube.com for me) to find music you like AND would work well in a freestyle. The kicker is that it also has to be the right tempo for your horse. Tempos can be modified, but large modifications (more than around 10%) probably won't end up sounding the way you want. Also, it really needs to be music that's quite pleasing for judges of every background. The BHB's favorite music happens to be R&B... but I can't imagine it would go over as well with the judges as classic rock would!

For the DIY-er, you can download the free music editing program Audacity. It's not a very beginner-friendly program, so if you're not very tech-savvy you might be better off hiring a professional. Heck, anyone would probably be better off hiring a professional... I'm just trying to see if I can squeeze by in creating a great lower-level freestyle without spending more than $3. Granted, I've done plenty of video editing in the past, but editing music seems to be much more complicated.I do realize I may have to end up hiring someone to create seamless music, but at least it will be less expensive since I've picked out the music and made the choreography.

If you're still reading this after hearing how daunting music editing can be, let's go to the next step. First, I did rough edits of the music to eliminate the part of the music that I don't want to use. I figure if I have a 5 minute limit and have to do all of my movements in both directions, then I need no more than 45 seconds of walk, 1 1/2- 2 minutes of canter, and around 2 minutes of trot. Counting in both directions for the trot and canter, and I could probably edit it down to 1 minute trot and canter segments to repeat in my freestyle. I still left 2-3 minutes of music for each gait so that I had enough to easier match it to my choreography without creating horrid franken-music by piecing many different parts together and loosing the natural song flow.

I video-taped my choreography ridden how I'd like to show it so that I could get timing for each movement.  Then I used Audacity to edit the segments. I found the segments I wanted and pieced them together with Fade/ Cross-Fade effects. I'm still learning to use Audacity, so maybe in the future I'll figure out how to use some other effects in editing freestyle music.


A few educational articles on choosing and editing freestyle music:
USDF Connection article "Got Music?"
USDF Connection article "The Wow Factor"
USDF Connection Article "To Turn a Phrase"