Dancing With the Stars ’ music director and composer, Ray Chew , works closely with the show’s professional dancers to arrange the songs played live in the ballroom each week.
“They’re very specific about a lot of things that they’re looking for,” Chew, 66, exclusively told Us Weekly of the DWTS pros on Thursday, October 17. “They may be looking for a little sound that happens [at the] 29 seconds [mark] so they can do a little arm [movement].”
Chew added that the pros pick up on moments in songs that “nobody else hears,” which informs their choreography.
“They’re like, ‘Well, I need to do a little movement on that,’” he explained. “There’s a lot of very, very specific things that they look for. And it’s very, very challenging at times. But I love the challenge.”
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When asked to pick which of the season 33 pros — Witney Carson , Jenna Johnson , Daniella Karagach , Brandon Armstrong , Alan Bersten , Rylee Arnold , Val Chmerkovskiy , Sasha Farber , Gleb Savchenko , Britt Stewart , Emma Slater , Pasha Pashkov and Ezra Sosa — have the strongest opinions about their music, Chew said he couldn’t pick just one.
“All of them,” he said. “All of them are world class winners. They’ve come from all over the world … and when they converge here, they’re very competitive.”
Chew noted that all the pros tell him “exactly what they want” in “a very respectful way.” As he works on the arrangements for the songs that the pros and their celebrity partners perform each week, the pros provide him with “revisions and modifications” right up until show time.
Once the love show is over, the work begins all over again.
“As soon as we finish the show is when I get my big pile of stuff [for the following week],” Chew said.
Before Chew joined the DWTS team in 2014, he served as American Ido l’s music director from 2010 to 2013. He told Us that he had more freedom with song arrangements on Idol , whereas with DWTS he’s trying to recreate the songs’ recorded versions as closely as possible.
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“When I was doing American Idol as a music director, I could do the style of a popular song the way I kind of interpreted it. … I didn’t have to go and research every article and particle that was in the original. I could do it with the style of my band. I was free to kind of implement and add some different things as long as it supported the contestant,” he explained. “With [ DWTS ], I have to go and find that little sound that was at [the] 1 minute and 15 seconds [mark] from the original [and recreate it].”
Chew refers to that process of breaking down a song to the sum of its parts before creating a new arrangement as trying to “unbake the cake.”
“I have to figure out what is in the sauce,” he said. “[You] go to some fine restaurant and you taste this wonderful gravy sauce. Now, imagine if you had to sit there and decipher what is in that sauce. It could take you five minutes to actually make it, but hours trying to figure out what’s in the sauce. And that’s the steps we have to do, because nobody is sitting there giving us that information.”
Another unique challenge of DWTS is that Chew has to be prepared to make any song appropriate for any style of dance, whether it be a rumba, cha cha or Viennese waltz.
“With any song, we can make it into any style. And that’s my job,” he said. “There was nothing previous to this show where I had to take the song ‘Get Down On It’ and make a rumba out of it.”
In addition to arranging, Chew plays a role in selecting songs for each week’s theme. Some themes so far this season have included Soul Train Night and Hair Metal Night .
“It’s a team effort,” Chew said of the song selection process. “You have the network and you have the celebrity guests. You have our great choreographers who also dance the thing. It’s a big team, and everybody kind of chimes in on that.”
Chew said that although the celebrity contestants get “a lot of input” in choosing which songs they’ll perform, they don’t always get their wish. Sometimes, the show won’t have the rights to a song that a contestant wants to dance to.
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“Previous to this year, all Prince songs were off the table,” he said. “I think it might be different now, but there are certain categories [we don’t do], like artists who will not let you use their music. A lot of that stuff determines what can and cannot be used.”
While DWTS is keeping him busy, Chew has several other projects in the works as well. After coproducing the 2018 documentary Two Beats One Soul with his wife, Vivian Scott Chew , Ray is looking to expand the film into a series. Two Beats One Soul shines a light on Cuban culture and brings together artists from both Cuba and the United States.
“It was a cultural exchange,” Ray told Us of the original film. “It spurred the idea of us doing a series that would occur in different places around the globe, and not only internationally, but domestically.”
Chew also teased his next album, My Journey , which is due out in 2025, and his upcoming gig directing an all-star lineup of artists at Carnegie Hall’s Night of Inspiration on December 14.
“It’s a congregation of cultures and people coming together in a unique atmosphere that brings secular and non-secular music together with different different genres of music,” he said of the New York City event. “[It’s happening] on a great stage with a 150 [piece] mass choir and 64 piece orchestra.”
Dancing With the Stars airs simultaneously on ABC and Disney+ Tuesdays on ABC at 8 p.m. ET. You can stream episodes on Disney+ the next day.
Two Beats One Soul is now streaming on Black Experience on Xfinity and Xumo.
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