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Choosing a disc dog freestyle song can be the easiest thing in the world or one of the hardest. It is kind of a feast or famine situation for most players. And then the boredom sets in…
There are many reasons for choosing a song and many ways a song can function for you and your routine.
Here are a few…
Song as Background
Sometimes a song is simply a cool background vybe. A sonic tapestry for your jam.
This is often the case when you don’t really have a song that you are wedded to. It’s not a bad idea to have a good background track in your back pocket for when the musical times get tough and you don’t really have a song.
If you are one of the many people who just wants a background groove to jam to, that’s cool. You do that. Choosing a song doesn’t need to be a hassle.
Personal Vybe or Inspiration
Songs can serve as a personal anthem. You might want to play to a song that really gets your juices going. Maybe the lyrics inspire you. Music is funny like that; it’s affective and makes you feel things.
Playing to a song that really suits your personal vybe or inspires you can be one of the most powerful performance songs. Just make sure you don’t sacrifice your jam, freak people out, or put people to sleep with it.
That said, if you’re really feeling it and are truly inspired, it most likely won’t look strange at all.
Story or Narrative
Choosing a song that tells a story or creating or shaping a story around a song is a super interesting way and reason for choosing a song.
While difficult to really pull off like a full blown story, that everybody understands and appreciates, crafting a narrative for your routine or using a storyline to create a feeling or style of play pr movement isn’t so hard.
Developing a storyline for a performance can completely change the way you approach it. It can slow you down, make you look more serious, make you look playful. Using music to tell a story can be quite liberating for your creativity.
Having a story or narrative – a feeling or idea, that can be echoed later in the routine or triggered a few times in your movements and tricks throughout can be helpful for creativity and viewing pleasure.
Telling a complete story, like something everybody gets, that hits on beats and stuff, or maybe interacts with the crowd is extremely hard to pull off. It can be done, and it does inspire awe when done well, but it can be easy to flop.
Audio or Performance Framework
Sometimes people try to use music as sort of an audio framework. Perhaps something like a mechanical, or electronic storyline. Using the beats and sounds and trying to match with the play. It is similar to using the song as a storyline, but it doesn’t have the emotional hits.
It’s a sequence of events that are timed to music. It looks cool when done well, but has similar problems as the “story Story” storyline above, timing the beats is hard, and it is much harder at a contest than on the practice field.
On Time and Pace
I like to stay around 96-108 BPM. That is plenty fast. I like to run slow dogs to fast music, and it’s pretty cool to run fast dogs to slow music. 120BPM is almost always too fast.
Resist the urge to play to something of a speed that compels the dog to gallop at high speed or compels you to act rashly. Be careful when choosing a slower song that seems to lag a bit too much. Slower songs with a groove can and often do have hidden, faster beats embedded within them that are surprisingly easy to hit with fast dogs.
Fast songs sometimes have a slower beat that the handler can groove to. These fast songs often make the dog a bit wild though.
