What should I look for in a competition music editor?
Ask to hear before-and-after examples, check they understand your discipline’s rules, and confirm how many revisions are included and what the turnaround is in business days. An editor who cannot play you their own work is the easiest one to rule out.
Answered by Hanif Esmail Co-founder & Lead Audio Engineer
The one question that filters most of the field
"Can I hear a before and after?"
Anyone can describe clean transitions. Very few will play you the original alongside the finished edit and let you hunt for the joins. An editor who does that is confident the work holds up under exactly the scrutiny a judge will give it.
If the answer is a portfolio of finished tracks with no originals to compare against, you are being asked to take the hard part on trust.
What else to check
Do they know your discipline’s rules
Floor music being instrumental, programs needing a defined ending rather than a fade, division time limits. An editor who has to ask you what the rules are will not catch it when something breaks one.
How many revisions are included
And what counts as a revision. "Unlimited revisions" and "two revisions" can end up at the same place if the two are generous and the unlimited ones are slow.
What the turnaround is
In business days, from when they have everything from you. Vague answers here tend to become a problem in the week before a competition.
Who is doing the work
A person making musical decisions produces a different result from an automated trim. Ask.
What you receive at the end
Format, sample rate, and whether the file has been mastered for a venue PA or just exported.
How they handle a problem
If the edit is wrong two days before the competition, what happens? The answer tells you more about the service than the price does.
Roxane Genot - Waiting On A Wish
Since we are recommending you ask for this — here is ours. Original and finished edit, side by side.
Before — Original
Roxane Genot - Waiting On A Wish
Original Song with no editing. Overall bad sound and lifeless track.
Signals worth paying attention to
They ask about the routine, not just the song
Where the peak is, where the elements fall, what the choreography needs. An editor who only asks for a start and end time is trimming, not editing.
They tell you when your idea will not work
Some target lengths are not achievable from a given song without it sounding rushed. Hearing that before you pay is a good sign.
The pricing is legible
You can work out what your job will cost before you commit, including add-ons and extra songs.
What matters less than people think
Which software they use is not a meaningful signal — the same tools are available to everyone, and the decisions are what differ. A long turnaround is not automatically worse than a short one if the work is being queued rather than rushed. And the cheapest quote is only a problem when it is cheap because the revisions are not included.
Hear the work before you commit.
Every sample in our portfolio shows the original alongside the finished edit, so you can judge the joins yourself.