The Music- Skip Haynes

Songs to Make Dogs Happy!
by Skip Haynes composer
www.PetCDs.com

Music for pets? Who would’ve thought about creating music for pets? Pet lovers – that’s who. Us. We built a whole record company on the premise of creating music for pets and other animals.

We got the idea of writing music for pets sitting on the patio at the Country Store in Laurel Canyon.  We were talking about our own pets and creating an online radio station in Laurel Canyon and somehow it turned into “we should start a record company that makes music for pets and other animals and we should call it the Laurel Canyon animal Company.”  So we did. We started creating music for pets and pet lovers almost immediately a have been doing so ever since. Must have been something in the air.

The music and lyrics were composed based on the responses of individual dogs as well as focus groups of dogs conducted by Dr. Ogden over a period of several months. The CD also includes songs for dog lovers based on our experience with our own dogs and the input we have received from hundreds of our customers and their dogs. Dr. Kim (Dr. of public health) insisted that if we were going to create music for dogs, it was going to have to be qualitatively and quantitatively researched. Since this was the first time we had ever tried to create music for dogs we said absolutely.

We gave Dr. Kim a CD with different kinds of music and she would play the music for dogs in groups of 8 to 10 dogs at a time. She would send us the dog’s responses that we then used to create the music beds for the songs. We then had to create music for dog’s lyrics and marry them to the music beds created using the information sent to us by Dr. Ogden. We would then send the rough mixes back to Dr. Kim and she would test them out in a canine focus group for tempo, lyrics, melody and instruments. We did this several times with each song.

Trying to create music for pets and pet lovers led us to working with many different animal communicators in many different situations. And even though we started out to create music for pets, we ended up not only creating music for pets but music for gorillas, for pink dolphins, for children, and for mountain lions.

Making music for pets has been and still is a most wonderful learning experience for us and hopefully for the pets and other animals too.

To purchase visit www.PetCDs.com