Keeping Time, Part One: Finding the Beat

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You know what sucks? Going to someone for help about something, and having them spit out a bunch of big words you can't understand and only serve to inflate their ego. That's how I feel sometimes when I ask others about better ways to teach dance timing to students.

The problem is, there's a whole language that's used and taken for granted by music majors everywhere: Beats, bars, measures, phrases... It all sounds like so much gibberish to someone who doesn't have a background in music (like me).

I eventually developed a working understanding with these terms, but it still comes back to bite me when I try to explain how to find the beat of the music to others. Consider this my latest and greatest effort, and let me know if it helps 🙂

Transcript:

I can't tell you how many people I have heard say, "I have no natural rhythm." See, there seems to be this preconception that, if you weren't born with this innate sense of music, that you can't learn it later in life, or not without a lot of intense training.

But the truth is rhythm is as innate to us as our own heartbeat. Timing on the other hand, has to be learned. And by the end of this month, you know exactly what you need to know to learn.

Hi guys my name is Ian Crewe. I'm an instructor at the Joy of Dance Centre in Toronto, Ontario, and the creator of Social Ballroom Dance: Where you can learn your dance, at your place, on your schedule.

Now, full disclosure before I get started: I have no formal musical training. So I learned to move to the music in very layman terms, which hopefully make sense for you too. I know how frustrating it can be when you're listening to somebody go on about beats and bars and phrases of music, and have no idea what that person is talking about.

So I'd like to start by looking at the difference between rhythm and timing, and then we'll explore how to anticipate the beat in music, so that we can move to it.

A rhythm is our natural sense of the music - whether it's sharp or soft, whether it's fast or slow, what the energy level of it is, and how we can move to the music that we hear. Now this is something like I said, that nearly all of us possess.

Now timing is a little more specific: it has to do with moving a specific part of our body - usually our feet - to the beat of the music. So, how do we find the beat?

First it's helpful as a dancer to separate music into two different sections: You have your melody, which is the more flowy aspects of the music; usually includes the vocals, sometimes piano strings - it's the part of the music that we remember the most.

And it overlies the other side, which is the percussion, and that's the drums, often you you might have a deeper like a cello or deeper strings that provides this rhythm: A pulse or emphasis in the music. That is the guide by which we know to move our feet to the music.

So if we listen to this Foxtrot, you'll be able to hear the melody, which is the saxophone followed by a piano, over the deeper string sound and the hi-hat - that's the cymbal portion of a drum ensemble. Let's pay a listen.

It's very important that we don't get confused by the melody: You can get easily confused if you focus on the wrong instrument.

Now, the emphasis in the song is every second beat - usually we have a louder or more deep emphasis on one beat, and it's alternating with a weaker emphasis on the next beat.

So a good example would be the beat we hear in a lot of dance-y clubs you'll hear something which sounds like "un-tis, un-tis, un-tis". The "un" is the drum; that's usually the stronger pulse and the "tis" is the hi-hat - the top part of a drum ensemble. That's the soft or the weaker pulse.

This is important, because in most dance styles the emphasis is on the first beat, or the downbeat, which means that we are going to take our first step to that pulse. But in something like a Foxtrot or a swing, it actually happens on the second beat or the upbeat. And that means that we will step in between the pulses.

(Watch the video for an explanation of this to music)

So you can see that most of the time we are stepping in between the pulses that we talked about.

Also, speaking of slows and quicks, that's a very common way that instructors use to teach the timing to their students. You might already know that a slow is two beats in the music, and a quick is only one beat, but that doesn't mean that's the only way to count the music.

For example, many people count East Coast Swing as "back-step-tri-ple-step, tri-ple-step", or their Cha Cha as "rock-recover, cha-a-se, rock-recover, cha-a-se". This way you can tie what your feet are doing to the beat of the music.

One more thing that I want to cover about this: You'll often hear people talk about things like 4/4 timing versus 3/4 timing. We don't need to know a lot about the different timings of a piece of music - at least, not as dancers.

Suffice to say that most of what you learn is going to be 4/4 timing. We can check whether the song is 4/4 or 3/4 by listening to the number of beats in a specific section of music - that is the length of time by which you hear a melody or percussion before that melody or percussion changes or repeats.

Let's listen to the Foxtrot song we talked about one more time, this time listening more closely to the saxophone in the first section, followed by the piano in the second section. Then let's start over, but this time we're going to count the number of beats in each section (it should be 8 for the saxophone and 8 for the piano).

Because eight is a multiple of four, we know that this is most likely 4/4 timing.  Now the other common one that you'll hear is 3/4 timing. This is used quite a lot in waltzes like slow waltz or Viennese waltz. So let us play a waltz song that will help you understand that a little bit better.

In this case, it's the percussion, not the melody, which tells us that this is 3/4 timing, because it has a repeating pattern that is only three beats long - you hear a lower downbeat, followed by two higher up beats.

So playing the above track one more time, we can hear one-two-three-repeat one-two-three, and so on.

Now I know this is a lot to take in right now, but if I accomplish one thing this month, it is to help you recognize that timing - like any skill - can be learned.  It's NOT something that you have to be born with.

Now that I've given you some useful timing tips, here's something that you can do to give back: Let me know what type of music you find most difficult to follow. Let us know in the comments below.

And if you had any questions or comments, you can message me on my Facebook fan page: Ballroom Dancers Anonymous. Or you can email me at ian@socialballroom.dance.

And if you like what you see and you want to see more of this, you can either subscribe to my YouTube page, or you can visit me on my website -  there's a ton of great material there to help you on your own dancing journey.

Next week my wife and I are  going to be on vacation in St. Lucia, so sadly that means there won't be a new vlog next week. But instead I will be putting up some of the more popular posts that I've written in the past related to timing. I will see you again in two weeks and until then, happy dancing!