00:00Hi, this is Ray Chu, music director with Dancing With The Stars, and we're here at the 20th anniversary with Deadline.
00:13Well, as music director, the way my job works is I'm responsible for all of the music for the dancers.
00:19And what that means is I have to make sure that everything that they want is prepared to spec.
00:25And they are, no joke, they want it exactly right to every millisecond, every little hip turn and arm twist.
00:34So every little syllable has to match that, and that's my job to deliver.
00:38On stage, sometimes you'll see the singers, and sometimes you'll see some of the instrumentalists.
00:43That's a staging issue that sometimes the production does.
00:46But musically, we make sure that the features are just the way the dance teams want it.
00:53The way the song pool works is that at the beginning of the season, they have a barrel full of songs.
01:01And then they are sometimes selected by the team, sometimes they are assigned.
01:07And that is not my pile, that's not my lane of swimming.
01:12What happens with me is after each show on Tuesday, Wednesday, I get a full week's worth of assignments that I have to start getting to work on.
01:21When I'm first getting to songs, it's not always clear to me how the choreography works.
01:29But I do know that I do get notes from that, that certain things are more important, certain accents are very, you know, exclusive and specific to one of their movements.
01:42And so that's the things that sometimes I have to focus on with regard to the original song approach itself.
01:51Well, when I was young, I always wanted to be exactly what I am.
01:55I've always dreamed of, prepared for, worked at.
02:00All my schooling, all my professional training brought me right to Dancing with the Stars.
02:06Well, on this show, we do all genres, and that can go from hip-hop to ballroom, Sinatra, back to Katy Perry.
02:16And I love it all, because all of these are within my professional experiences.
02:21But one of my favorite ones this season was The Wicked.
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