ProRodeo Sports News - May 15, 2020

in. I feel like if you’re scripted then each perf sounds the same and I hate that.” Hambone agreed. “I try not to play the same music in two perfs back-to-back, and that’s hard to do,” Hambone said. “I try to mix it up as much as I can. I don’t want to get stale with the same things for bull riding and saddle bronc riding. I want to keep it fresh for myself and the fans.” That’s been made easier as the tools of the trade have evolved. Since Franzen’s first rodeo as a music producer in 2000, she’s gone fromCDs and cassette tapes to mini discs and now entirely on computers. “My first player I had was an old CD player that would store 15 CDs at once, and you’d have to hurry up and get it to the next guy before he nods,” Franzen Loden said, adding that she carried a book of about 50 CDs to a rodeo. Now, she brings three external hard drives loaded with thousands of songs. “I couldn’t even give you a number,” she laughed. Hambone has a hard drive with 27,000 files as a reference point. Milburn’s collection is even bigger.

Amanda Dilworth photo Transitioning from CDs and cassettes to computers has made music selection on the fly a faster and easier process for PRCA music director Jill Franzen Loden.

“I have two-and-a-half terabytes of music, so I can go almost a year-and- a-half without listening to the same song twice if I play it nonstop 24 hours a day,” Milburn said. Of course, they’re always finding something new, and sometimes it’s on the fly.

PICKING THE SOUND Considering only snippets of songs are played along with plenty of sound effects, each rodeo’s music producer has an arsenal of sounds at their disposal. “You don’t go into a rodeo with just a set list,” Hambone said. “I’m all over the place and might throw in EDM (Electronic Dance Music) songs in the bareback riding. I really don’t play any country during the show, it just doesn’t fit any more, so I save that for the pre-show. Now it’s a lot of rock, dance and hip-hop.” In some cases, the music producer is more than just a DJ for the rodeo. They also control the volume for the clown and announcer while providing audio feed for TV broadcasts. “We edit everything too, you have to edit it to fit other music,” Franzen Loden said. “A lot of people don’t understand that, they think we are grabbing songs and playing them off our iPhone, but there’s so much more that goes into it. “Timing is everything. You can’t push play and expect it to work. The best music directors get the right song and the right part of the song to fit the show, and it enhances the ride and the audience’s experience.” Isolating those perfect sound bites is meticulous work. “Cutting the music can take anywhere from five minutes to an hour for a song, and by then you’ve heard it 20 times while turning it into a 10 to 15-second clip and are tired of hearing it,” Milburn said. “It’s pretty easy to play a thousand songs at a rodeo from start to finish since nothing gets played too long except for the pre- and post-rodeo music.” From there, selecting the songs is the easy part since the producers know their crowd. “Like in Puyallup, Wash., it’s a very urban crowd, so I can play a lot of EDM beats,” Hambone said. “And since Seattle was the place that founded the grunge scene, I can mix in Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden and see if they pick it up as, ‘Yeah, these are our boys.’ N.W.A., Ice Cube, Tupac, Snoop, Dre, I love those ’90s and 2000s hip-hop musicians. I also like to get a laugh out of the other contract personnel, because if they laugh then so are the contestants. I take it as a bigger compliment when the contestants give a compliment since they hear so many others in the business.” Knowing the audience and bringing something new to the table are equally important. “I know when I first played ‘Bangarang’ people were like that’s so crazy, but they loved the beat,” Franzen Loden said. “I like to read my crowds everywhere I go. If you just play country music, you get the stereotype that it’s just country. We want to bring other fans into rodeo, and music is a good way to do it.”

Photo courtesy Brandon Milburn More than 3,000 handpicked songs have been manually cut down to the ideal part for ProRodeo use by music director Brandon Milburn.

ProRodeo Sports News 5/15/2020

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