Process
The Process - 
A General Overview

Finding the right music for you and your horse and creating a winning and exciting composition is definitely a process, and the most time-consuming aspect of assembling a Freestyle. Your personalities come strongly into play. Since this is the moment that enables you to combine all of the elements you have practiced to this point - rhythm, balance, suppleness, timing - into a performance piece, you want to create something that will make you both shine - no matter what your level. In addition, the collaborative style of this method makes the outcome more rewarding for the horse and rider, and in tune with the spirit of the performance pieces themselves. The amount of time required to produce your piece will depend on your level and preferences. EquiChord always produces new, unique and enjoyable musical arrangements and compositions. Remember, if you are not able to meet with us in person, we can follow the process of creating music from videos, DVDs or online transmissions, as well as the correspondence you send us. This is our process in a nutshell: Discover the rider’s musical likes and dislikes, level of competition, etc. All this varies depending on the Package you choose. Below we are outlining the sequence of events as if we were starting the process from the very beginning. If you choose one of the arrangements from our catalogue, you are already most of the way there.

Find the AVERAGE BPMs (Beats Per Minute) for your horse. Remember your horse will be different as the process goes on and you both become familiar with the beat and routine. Your horse’s gait may also change when he/she is in a show situation. Therefore, we need to take an average BPM reading based on these factors. We will probably have to adjust your BPMs a couple of times during the process of creating your final piece. 
Choosing Your Music. This can be the most time-consuming part of the process. There are so many choices out there and not all will fit your horse’s BPMs or temperament. Although we can adjust BPMs to a point, we can only go so far as to not distort the integrity of the music. The best place to start is to listen to the samples in our catalogue. We’ve included arrangements from the more popular genres. If you find something that you like within our catalogue, we can either use it or find something similar. Remember, the primary goal is to find a piece of music that best fits your horse. It may not necessarily be your favorite piece of music! 
We do a rough edit of your music. At this stage, we put together a rough edit of your music based on your choreography. This entails assembling the music in the appropriate order to see if it makes musical sense. Our goal is to give you a piece that you would enjoy listening to outside the dressage arena. We don’t want to create what we call the “radio dial effect” — those freestyle pieces that sound like someone made a mistake and kept switching channels.
 Creating Your CD. Once the music pieces are selected, we will begin to create the arrangement. If you already have your choreography, we will ask for a video of you performing your routine. If we will be doing your choreography, the arranger/composer will work in collaboration with the choreographer to design a fluid piece. If you have sent us a DVD with your choreography, then we will send it back along with our music scored to the ride. If we are doing both the choreography and the music, we will send you the pattern and the music, and ask that you send us back a DVD of you riding the pattern to the music. At this point we can begin fine-tuning the choreography and the music. Don’t worry if your BPMs change and don’t fit anymore—we can fix that in the final edit.
 
A Note About Choreography. As a true performance piece, the music and the choreography must have a theme and a structure. There should be climaxes and moments of ease. The audience should be taken on the ride with you. Therefore, we want the arrangements to compliment your strengths and support the areas where you are not so strong. The music can make the high points of your ride shine and help the not so high points come to life. After all, this is a performance, and in order for it to catch the eyes and ears of the audience (including the judges), it has to be able to take them with you and be an overall exciting experience to hear and see. 

 Videotape your finished choreography. You can either meet with us in person and we can videotape you riding your choreography, or you can send us a video of your final choreography. We’ll fine tune the score, making sure the music supports the builds and changes within the choreography. By creating an exciting piece of music, we can give you something that is not only enjoyable for you to ride with, but also for the audience to hear. We will have put together a cohesive package with the same underlying theme and style. The transitions will flow seamlessly into each other creating an originally arranged or composed piece of music.

NOTE: We will always strive to create smooth transition points as well as emphasize key moves. If necessary, we will compose transitional segments that will help you and your horse smoothly transition from gait to gait, as well as help emphasize specific moves within the gaits such as lateral work or changes of collection, lead changes, etc. This is where your music begins to really take shape specifically for you and your horse.

Creating the Final Master. Taking all the information we have acquired from the previous steps, we go into the studio and review the videos and the rough edits. Going over them several times, we master the final version, adjusting the instrumentation or rhythms to enhance key sections of the performance piece. We will then put a sample of the final cut out on our secured website for you to review.
 Our goal is to help you develop the most entertaining, well-balanced and supportive composition or arrangement for you and your horse. We believe that doing a well put together musical Freestyle is a way to allow the fundamentals of good training and discipline to shine through.  mailto:charlie@EquiChord.com?subject=EquiChord%20Inquiryshapeimage_3_link_0
How we do it..... The approach we take to developing a winning Freestyle is that of professional producers. In the 5 minutes a competitor has to perform their Freestyle, they have to tell a story, take the audience on a journey, and make their hours of work and years of training look simple and fluid. The music frames and showcases all those elements. The analogy we often use is that of writing a novel versus a poem or song lyrics. In most novels, writers have 200+ pages in which to tell their story, whereas a lyricist or poet has to tell the same story with a few well-chosen and well-placed words. That is what we have to do as Freestyle designers; carefully pick the correct musical phrases that will allow the horse and rider to shine. Ultimately the Freestyle should not only be a joy to ride, but a delight to watch. Our combined years of experience and education as producers, musicians, performers, choreographers and directors as well as equestrians have given us a unique vantage point from which to effectively bring all these elements together. From a technological perspective, we utilize cutting edge systems and software to create seamless pieces. From both a performance and technical side, we know what works, and what works, wins! Pricing Seminars Clinics Come to Visit Us! Pricing.htmlClinicsSeminars.htmlClinicsSeminars.htmlLocations.htmlshapeimage_4_link_0shapeimage_4_link_1shapeimage_4_link_2shapeimage_4_link_3