Working with Sylvia on her Third Level Freestyle. She has the first draft of her choreography, a theme for her music but is having trouble finding canter music in her genre. We use websites like SongBPM.com, AudioJungle.net, and Spotify to browse music in the Trance/Electronic Dance Music genre and get creative with the choreography.

At the end we also talked about the conflict between being creative and interpreting the music versus making the beats match. And we also talked about possibility of creating some specific music using AI. Fun conversation!

In this video we take Sylvia's music and begin editing in Audacity. I show her how to split and fade the music, move it around based on her choreography and begin the creative editing process. Sylvia is working on a Third Level freestyle using yoga/EDM dance music.

In this call I worked with Janet Hawkins on her Second Level freestyle. She did a fabulous job putting her music to her trainer riding her horse on video. We examined all of the music to the gaits and movement, highlighting what we really liked and why. Then I worked with Tori Kistler on her Basic Level western dressage freestyle choreography. We talked about the required movements and the best way to arrange them for the horse she is riding, Rovandio. It is a lot of fun because Rovandio is my personal horse and he has never done western dressage before it is so sweet to see them dance together.

In this call it was just Sylvia and I working closely on her Third Level freestyle. She is new to using Audacity and editing music so I pulled up her music project and walked her through basic cropping, fading, cross-fading, and talking through the idiosyncrasies of Audacity. This is a good video to watch if you are in the same position yourself!

What a fun call! Sylvia debuted her new Third Level freestyle at a Ride-A-Test schooling show and shared all the fun details with us. She received amazing feedback from the judge and we discussed elements of her choreography that she might adjust and talked about fixing sound levels in her music. I did a quick overview of how to adjust sound levels in Audacity and then we moved on to Tori's Basic Level western dressage freestyle. She used Davinci Resolve (video editor) to add her music to her choreography just to get a basic sense of the layout. We talked about the music, the layout, whether to use lyrics or not, and what she should focus on when she starts editing in Audacity. Overall, a great call with each rider making so much progress!

What a productive call with a lot of chat about music editing and sound levels.🎶 I forgot to record the beginning of the call but we start off the video with Sylvia giving us an update on her freestyle. She rode at a Ride-A-Test and received feedback from the judge. We discussed the pros and cons of changing her walk on the centerline and how your technical/artistic scores come into play. Then we worked on Tori's Basic Level western dressage freestyle. I listened to each of the music transitions and we talked about how to crossfade the clips, line up the waveforms, and adjust sound levels. All she is missing is an entrance so we talked about where she might find something with a pretty fiddle to tack onto the music she already has. We finished with Susan's freestyle, she is finalizing her music edits on her French-inspired First Level freestyle and is so close! Everyone is doing so well and Tori and Susan are very close to joining Sylvia with their competition freestyles. ⭐️

Working again with Sylvia on her yoga inspired Third Level Freestyle…making great strides towards her freestyle with entrance and beautiful canter music.

We also spent a lot of time with Janet on her Second Level freestyle for her Lusitano. She wants to ride to the movie soundtrack from Shakespeare in Love. We reviewed the different tracks, found entrance and ending music, and discussed the challenges of using soundtrack music to create a freestyle.

In this call we worked on Janet's Second Level freestyle choreography - her first draft. We went step by step through her movements and talked about the pros and cons of each one, checked for missing movements (there was one), and also discusses whether to include 10m circles at trot/canter. Then we moved on to Tori who is working on a Basic Level western dressage freestyle. We watched video clips of her riding the canter to determine the BPM and match to some songs she was looking at. We settled on a theme with country singer Cody Johnson and had fun reviewing ideas for that!

We had a really fun call with two new riders! Warm welcome to Susan and Joanna! Susan has a grand goal of earning her Bronze Bar (First, Second, and Third level) in one year with her Third level gelding. We reviewed what she has done so far, listened to some music, and reviewed her choreography for First Level. She has a great start! Joanna designs musical freestyles herself and is a music professional so we had some good discussions about software programs and music editing. She didn't have a specific freestyle to discuss today but it was great to get to know her. Sylvia is refining her entrance music for her yoga-themed freestyle and we listened to it and thought of some ideas to improve. Sorry for the delay at the beginning as we tried to sort through Audacity and ways to possibly share music that will be more beneficial to the group. If anyone figures out a better process please let me know! My goal is for students to submit their Audacity files so I can edit them during the call and then email back as a project, not a finished music file. That is what I hope to figure out shortly!

What a fun call! So many different freestyle themes to talk about. We had Joanna working on two new themes for a Second level freestyle and a Level 5 Western Dressage freestyle. Sylvia is making great progress in her Third level yoga-themed freestyle, re-arranging her choreography to work with the edits of her music. Susan found some inspiring French music to match her updated choreography for First level and started picking different music for her Second level freestyle that she will compete at the same time working towards her Bronze Freestyle Bar. Tori has created her choreography for a Basic level Western Dressage freestyle but is concerned about the time limit. All-in-all it was a productive call!

What a jam-packed call! Sylvia had a question about burning her CD for a show so I went through the process for an Apple computer. It is a little tricky to figure out how to create the right files/formats sometimes but hopefully this helps! 🎶 Then I was joined by Susan who is at the music editing stage with her First Level freestyle so we talked through basic Fading in/out, Cross-Fading, and how to change tempo of a song. She was able to send her music to me through Google Drive and I worked on some of her transitions to get her started. If you are learning Audacity right now this is the video for you! 😀

In this video we talk with Bonnie, Sylvia, and Tori. ⭐️ I began with Bonnie going through the first stages of freestyle creation, talking about using a metronome app to find her horse's ideal BPM while riding and then some music ideas. We worked on Sylvia's Third Level freestyle, changing the walk choreography after she got feedback from her first USDF show where she earned BOTH of her scores for her Bronze Freestyle Bar...congrats Sylvia! 🏆 Then we talked to Tori about her entrance music to finish up her Basic Level western dressage freestyle. We found a good instrumental version of her trot song on Karaoke-Version.com where she can select particular instruments like the guitar and fiddle to blend into her current selections. As always a fun call working on freestyles of all levels and stages of creation! 💖