For Collier Wimmer, the business that now shapes some of the sport's most memorable freestyles began as a favor.
"It was a happy mistake that Three Wishes was founded," she said.
Wimmer grew up in a dressage family. Her mother, Ashley Wimmer, is the rider in the house, and Collier spent her childhood at horse shows, riding in backyard lessons and, eventually, on a collegiate team. As a young girl, she admits she found most of dressage a little dull. The freestyle was the exception.
"I always loved watching the freestyle classes because that was always interesting," she said.
When she was in high school, her mother's coach needed music for a freestyle and thought the tech-savvy teenager might be able to help. Armed with little more than Windows Movie Maker ("our OG digital audio workstation," Wimmer laughed) and a sense of what music suited the horse, she put one together. It went on to score well at regionals, and word spread.
"She started telling people, 'I've got this girl that does this,'" Wimmer recalled.
That favor grew into Three Wishes Freestyles, and Wimmer's background explains why the work suits her. She spent 16 years in the Royal School of Music program and has ballroom danced competitively her entire life, which she still does at a national level. Each discipline feeds the others, she explained. The music helps her build the freestyle; the dance helps her coach riders on how to ride the test well, and a lifetime around horses helps her develop the story. Today she balances Three Wishes with a full-time day job as a Global Marketing Manager at Deloitte, splitting her year between her home in Winston-Salem, N.C., and Wellington, Fla., for the winter circuit.
Starting With the Story
For Wimmer, creating a Grand Prix freestyle doesn’t begin with a playlist, but a conversation.
"My job is to build their story in a lot of ways," she explained. "I act almost like a therapist. What is your story, and how do I tell that?"
There is a strategy in that conversation, too. A rider with eyes on a CDI or a major dressage final needs music that resonates with judges and audiences, not just with the person in the saddle. Above all, Wimmer said, the music has to be an audio portrait of the horse.
"I think a lot of people get stuck in this thought process that we have to do something ‘known,’” she said. “You don't have to, as long as it's good, it resonates, and it is a representation of your horse."
That means that Wimmer provides honest advice. For example, a rider with a big, black, serious horse who wants circus music because he is “funny at home” will hear, with love, that the judges do not know he is a character.
Still, Wimmer is clear about who holds the final word: "My riders always have veto power. It's their story at the end of the day."
Auditioning the Music and Gamifying the Floor Plan
The first step to creating a freestyle is a round of demos. Wimmer pulls options from her music library, adds any pieces the rider already loves, and lays each candidate under video of the horse in an arena. While watching the horse move to the music, the rider can judge objectively whether it fits, and they work through rounds until the right piece emerges. When it does, the reaction is unmistakable.
"The text messages, the emails, the calls I get are all caps and say, ‘THIS IS THE ONE!’" she exclaimed. "It's the most fun part."
In parallel, Wimmer and the rider (and sometimes the trainer) sit down with the rulebook and a diagram of the arena and map out the floor plan. Every horse is different, so the exercise starts with identifying the horse’s strengths and being honest about their weaknesses. One horse she worked with could produce extended canter to piaffe, and tempi changes into a pirouette into piaffe, so those combinations became highlights.
"We gamify the floor plan," she said, which means placing the horse's best movements where they will land hardest, while tucking away weaker elements where the horse can execute them best.
Wimmer builds the freestyle like a story.
"It’s like eighth-grade English class: rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. I build a freestyle like that in my mind," she said.
The music informs the design as much as the design informs the music. Wimmer keeps notebooks (she describes herself as "an analog human") with music broken down by timestamp, noting the transitions and swells that might line up with a change of pace or a pirouette.
Once the rider is confident in the floor plan and sends back video of them riding the drafted plan, Wimmer produces what she calls an “80 percent draft,” which is the chosen music laid under the video. From there, the rider starts practicing, and the refining begins.
Hoofbeats and tempo sit at the heart of that refinement.
"What sells the story is syncing the music up with the horse, and at the core of that is the hoof beats and the beats per minute," Wimmer said. “If a horse is off the beat, an audience or judge feels that something is wrong even if they cannot say what.”
Once the build starts, Wimmer adjusts the music's tempo to match the horse precisely, a step she approaches with care. It also gives the rider a built-in tool. Some Grand Prix dressage horses can get "a little spicy" in a big arena, and a rider who knows the music can use it as a metronome. If the music is running ahead and the horse is getting quick, they need to slow down. If it lags, the horse needs a bit more energy.
In the best partnerships, Wimmer said, that relationship goes deeper. Her dance background shapes how she coaches riders to "sit in the pocket of the music” or lock into the natural groove, rhythm, and feel of a song with effortless accuracy. She instructs them to know it well enough subconsciously that it becomes a safety net, rather than letting it wash over them in the heat of competition.
The freestyle isn’t complete when the music is locked.
"I don't ever really go away," Wimmer said with a laugh. "Freestyles are never really done."
She locks in an iteration of the soundtrack for a time, but as horses and riders grow, the freestyle can and usually will grow with them. The process includes new floor plans, tweaked tempos, and updated edits. One notable freestyle that Wimmer worked on, Anna Buffini (now Boettner) and FRH Davinia la Douce’s “Top Gun Maverick” freestyle that went on to the 2023 FEI World Cup Final, reached version 16.
"Not because the previous 15 were bad," Wimmer explained, "but because we kept refining and tweaking, and that's what makes a really good story."
The Limbic System Test
What separates a good soundtrack from a great one?
For Wimmer, it comes down to emotion and to the science of how the brain responds to music.
"Good freestyle designers are like six-minute movie composers," she said. "We are producing a live movie. Our bodies tend to mimic what music tells us to do, which is why a certain two-note theme makes us anxious, and why piano sometimes soothes us. A freestyle can put that to work.”
She and her United Kingdom-based colleague, designer Tom Hunt, trade drafts regularly and share a simple gut check. If either gets an emotional response watching a draft on a laptop, they are on the right track.
Sometimes being on the right track means making a choice that is counterintuitive. In one freestyle this year, the rider's one-tempi changes come straight down the centerline toward C. Most designers would reach for a big piece of music. But because the rest of the freestyle was already so large, Wimmer stripped everything away and used only drums.
"It's almost this primal line of music, and that kicks in such a cool limbic system response," she said.
Her own music taste runs toward the opposite end of the spectrum.
"I want to be crushed by an 80-person orchestra through the loudspeakers," she shared.
“Whichever sound the rider chooses, the goal is the same. Give people goosebumps.”
Putting the Horse First
Wimmer makes sure to ask whether a horse is sound sensitive, since the experience has to be a positive one for the animal. For those horses, she still finds beautiful music, only with fewer instruments and gentler edges. Sometimes sensitivity only appears later. One longtime client's horse had a bad experience with a speaker, and their freestyle had to be rebuilt for a couple of years.
"I never want to sacrifice the horse's well-being just for a freestyle," she said. "I want them to have a good experience and love their music."
Many horses do.
"I think they resonate with music," she said.
She noted that some horses become noticeably more energized and expressive when their freestyle begins. When a horse seems to respond to the rhythm and character of the music, the work looks more fluid and uninhibited, which can elevate artistic marks. It also gives the crowd something to connect with: a horse who looks like a willing, engaged partner makes the whole performance feel more alive.
A Busy Year, and What Comes Next
This summer tested her stamina. Eighteen of the athletes she works with headed to the FEI North American Youth Dressage Championship in Traverse City, Mich., and 10 made it to the freestyle. Next up is the US Equestrian Open Dressage Final in Thermal, Calif., where one of her riders, Micah Deligdish (ISR), will debut a brand-new freestyle. Wimmer is keeping the details close, saying only that the music took a 180-degree turn from pop to something "really big and dramatic."
For anyone watching the freestyles in Thermal and wondering why some rides give them chills, Wimmer has an answer.
"Freestyles are what bring the general population and more people into dressage," she said, "so we have to make it as good as we can for everyone."
Like any good movie or book, she added, if it is good, people will come, and it will resonate.
Tune In to the Action from Thermal
Watch the US Equestrian Open Dressage Final live from the Desert International Horse Park on November 13-14, 2026, on USEF Network and ClipMyHorse.TV.
Connect With the US Equestrian Open
Stay up to date on US Equestrian Open news and standings on Facebook and Instagram. Follow US Equestrian on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. Use #USEquestrianOpen.