Adding musicality to my salsa dancing

[JC_Denton]

Hi Guys,

JC here again. Relatively new to salsa here.

My basic goal (aside from not having several left foot) is also to add musicality to my dancing. That is dance to sometimes the other instruments or vocals and then switch back, as when I want.

Wanted to ask if you guys have any advice (as general or as specific as it may be) about how to add musicality to my dancing.

In particular, for songs that I haven't heard before, how would I go by "predicting" (based on the measure heard immediately before) what will happen next?

Do you think learning about salsa music theory would help?

Any reasonable advice would be pretty helpful.

Thanks a lot!

 

[ColdSalsero]

In particular, for songs that I haven't heard before, how would I go by "predicting" (based on the measure heard immediately before) what will happen next?

If you listen to enough salsa music, eventually you will develop a magical Jedi sixth sense that will enable you to guess transitions and breaks in the music before they happen. That said, some songs are just easier to predict than others. Point is, listen (AND DANCE!) to lots of salsa music.

Do you think learning about salsa music theory would help?

No. If you want to learn about the clave and all that stuff, it's certainly interesting, but it won't help you predict the music. It CAN help you dance a little better though, especially if you dance On2. It can help with your musicality a little too, but not a whole lot.

If you really want to improve your musicality (and I'm talking about in shines, not in partner work...that's quite a bit harder), then learning how you can use different shines and body movement to express the music and different instruments will help there.

So learn lots of shines and body movement, and how you can apply them to the music. Also, watch lots of dancing videos, social dancing or performances, to see how other people do it.

What can also help improve your musicality (and your partner work, for that matter) is if you learn to perform a salsa routine, which of course has to have lots of musicality in it. If you're a beginner and you're not quite ready for that, don't worry about it, but I'm telling you, the rigors of training to perform can help improve your social dancing a lot.

 

[azzey]

My basic goal (aside from not having several left foot) is also to add musicality to my dancing.

Wanted to ask if you guys have any advice (as general or as specific as it may be) about how to add musicality to my dancing.

Have you read some of the many musicality threads? You can find them by using the search function.

This thread has lots of ideas for you and links to other threads:
Musicality

That is dance to sometimes the other instruments or vocals and then switch back, as when I want.

The first thing to do is to do active listening training to be able to focus and hear the instruments seperately.

Second, to train your body to move quickly enough to be able to react to the music that you're hearing.

In particular, for songs that I haven't heard before, how would I go by "predicting" (based on the measure heard immediately before) what will happen next?

You can only do this by experience. That is, for your brain to have heard particular rhythms many times before and thereby sense that there is going to be a particular hit or break next. This is of course, not always so, as musicians like to fool the listener and make their particular arrangement a little bit original.

However, there are some things you can learn to prepare/assist you in the effort. Particularly things like phrasing.

An example breakdown of a song is:
http://www.salsaforums.com/showthread.php?t=5317&page=14#p131

Often the outro is a repeat of the intro and there are lots of other repeats. So once you hear one piece and memorise it (even on a new song), you can be pretty sure you're going to hear it again later on in the track, possibly with variations.

Musicality on a new song

Do you think learning about salsa music theory would help?

Depends what you think of as salsa music theory?

What would be more useful is learning how to identify the instruments seperately, learning what beats they're often on, how the rhythms repeat etc, breaking down phrasing and song arrangements for some example songs etc.

This is not the kind of thing you can do when you're dancing because you have too much else to pay attention to, but something you can learn and practice at home with a Timing/Phrasing CD (e.g. google 'AOTC salsa') and some music tracks that you hear at the club.

 

[azzey]

No. If you want to learn about the clave and all that stuff, it's certainly interesting, but it won't help you predict the music.

I kinda of agree and disagree about this point.

Learning the Clave will help you predict where the next Clave beats will be, which is sometimes useful. Also other instruments are arranged around the Clave, so when there are few instruments (including the Clave) playing it may help to orient oneself, but yeah if you want to predict irregular Timbales patterns Clave won't help much with that. You need to learn about the Timbales.

Where I do disagree is that learning "all that stuff" won't help you predict the music. I assume "all that stuff" includes all the other instruments patterns: Conga drums, Bass, Timbales, Piano/Montuno, Cascara, Cow bells, Cymbals, singer etc.

I think any kind of musical education can help as long as it includes experiential learning and active listening.

Of course even good salsa musicians need to learn and practice dancing to the music.

 

[azzey]

Any reasonable advice would be pretty helpful.

If you're a visual person, learning to visualise some of the instruments, rhythms and accents and phrases might help.

Google or YouTube for SalsaBeatMachine. This was created by one of our SF members, Flujo.

 

[JC_Denton]

To azzey and ColdSalsero: Thanks a lot for the advice!

To ColdSalsero: Your advice on learning a lot of shines and thinking how you can apply them makes a lot of sense! Generally knowing certain musical patterns and the corresponding shines that can help is a really good strategy. Currently, I know very little shines and so when a lot of music that does come by which can be played with, I am just lost, and would lose my footwork. I think having several musicality-based sub-routines will be very helpful in general as well.

To azzey: Your advice on training my body to respond quickly to music is also spot on. Sometimes the musical breaks and beats happen with very little warning, and I find myself unable to personify it even after predicting it. Studying salsa music in general seems pretty helpful.

When you guys are on the dance floor, are you guys actively listening to the various musical instruments and predicting(and acting upon) musical changes?

 

[Smejmoon]

Good questions and advice Look around the forum, I have found many answers here and people have gone through similar process years before. Here is my perspective on how to listen and what pay attention to. Right now I'm considering if I should learn more music theory and add chord progressions to the concepts.

When you guys are on the dance floor, are you guys actively listening to the various musical instruments and predicting(and acting upon) musical changes?

I used to do so, but now only if I have not heard the song before and it's great and sometimes for solos. Rather I'd go to DJ booth after dance and ask, what was it. Not all DJs like to share their "secrets", but some do. Or ask more experienced dancers for artist name or at least genre.

 

[Francisco]

When you guys are on the dance floor, are you guys actively listening to the various musical instruments and predicting(and acting upon) musical changes?

I do not listen to de various musical instruments but the whole, ussually there is a buildup to a break and most breaks are repeated troughout the song... so with actively listining you might miss the first break, the second break but you should get the third

 

[Offbeat]

I can predict the music most of the time. I don't know how or why.

I think learning about salsa music will help you in more ways than just getting good at predicting.

Almost everyone's advise above is good. Don't forget to check other older threads on the topic.

 

[azzey]

Generally knowing certain musical patterns and the corresponding shines that can help is a really good strategy.

If you're thinking that specific shines correspond to certain musical patterns, you would be missing a whole lot of variation. You can fit almost any movement to any music, with slight modifications.

Pay attention to intensity of movement and music, how sharp the musical break/accent is and make the movement or lack of (pauses) fit.

When you guys are on the dance floor, are you guys actively listening to the various musical instruments and predicting(and acting upon) musical changes?

Personally, yes. Both individual instruments and the whole song and flow of it. Even on old songs I've heard hundreds of times before I'm often listening for some different/deeper aspect that I can dance differently to. After 9 years of intense listening and dancing to the music I'm always finding something I didn't hear exactly that way before.

 

[sweavo]

What is your timescale? If you are in this for life then I really recommend learning the Cuban dances and rhythms, especially the Folkloric dances and Son. The rhythmic patterns all appear in the percussion solos in salsa dura, and they appear in much more extended and varied ways in timba. When you have studied even a little of the orisha dances, then you develop a palette of movements (not moves, movements) that you can draw from and you will feel when the music is drawing from those influences.

If you want instant results, I'd say the #1 skill is to be able to count steadily and relate other rhythms to it. If you can tap the pulse with one hand while playing another rhythm with the other hand, then you will develop the ability to keep your orientation in the timeline while you go off and dance "off time" with a melody line that took your fancy.

As to predicting the music, music is inherently repetitious, so even within one song you can listen the first time through and try to nail it the second time through. The composition will be slightly varied from the first to the second pass so you'll have a game to play of trying to predict how the structure and motifs have been altered the next time through.

After I studied a little about motifs (I am an ear-trained percussionist who just recently studied regular music theory to about grade 2) I found I could start to "follow" piano solos and suchlike with about 70% accuracy having never heard the particular solo before.

All the above assumes that you are listening, listening, listening!

 

[musicistheanswe]

The one thing I would recommend is:

Put on some music that you really like/love. Doesn't have to be salsa.

Dance to it.

Bang, dancing!

If you don't like the songs, or really feel them well then, any "musicality" you do display will be artificial... or fake. Like pre-set "styling" techniques.*

I think in time the more you dance and the more time you spend listening to records you'll start to really love all records and then it will be very easy.

Until that starts happening (maybe never, depending on your djs), you can work on the coordination stuff like imitating rhythms with a simple but repeatable movement - but it doesn't sound like that stuff worries you.
If you want the stuff you do to look good, or you want to be able to display what I called the "fake" stuff then work on that (but to be honest in terms of aesthetic boost to input ratio the time is probably better spent buying nice clothes and a haircut).



* It'd be really great if we can get rid of this idea of layering "styling" and "musicality" that goes on top, like some icing. Technique is just the empty plate. You can have a cake without a plate, it'll just be messy!
But you can't have a dance without flavour and music. You get your technique plate from someone else and then you build your creation be it pie, cake, salad, pasta or whatever else it is you want to make on it. So many people get trapped admiring how shiny their plates are, forgetting that the end goal is to make things so that people don't even see the plate. The kind of dancing that blows you away is the stuff you just don't understand!! I say make sure your plate is big and great but only so that it can hold all the stuff you want to do!

 

[borikenSalsero]

I'm with musicistheanswe. I still, as I've posted too many times, say that musicality is not technique nor skill, if we follow that rout to musicality our dancing will be empty. If that weren't the case then the majority of advanced skill dancers wouldn't look empty. Yet, they do. Even when hitting as many breaks as they can. I agree that learning skill will certainly annotate the song to impeccable perfection, but the result is still empty if we can't speak out ourselves in the dance. We'll say nothing because we've meant nothing. We can't be musical because we've made skill the meaning of our dance.

If we want to be musical, attention must be directed to our feelings. How does a song make us react? I'm far too sure that for the majority of us it won't be to execute an orisha call, nor what joe smith does during a shine routine. It is about us, what does the music tell us to do? Skill is something we learn, where as musicality is something we already have: the reaction that comes from our inner self to a particular rhythm. Yet, our concern continues to mount over learning steps, and patterns to execute to musical sections. That might be all good when you are a beginner in search of things to do just for the sake of progress, but once skill levels increases it becomes all too apparent that the dancer isn't musical, but running through 5 years of classes, 2000 hours of practice.

The capability in which a dancer hits a note, or breaks in the music only speaks of skill level. If you want to be musical, and you want to look like you live what you dance, put songs that make you want to jump out of your skin, then listen to your body. Sit back and feel how your body reacts to the music, once you are at that state, put the feelings and movement that comes out into a salsa dance content. By content normally all it takes is keeping the beat, and not looking like you are having a heart attack.

If you really become in tune with your feelings, the song will speak to you, and your body will respond with what you mean to say, not what everyone else has told you should happen, and be said according to some elevated degree of technique.

 

[sweavo]

:notworthy: to both

 

[azzey]

Sometimes I get caught up answering the question that was asked.

Agree with Musicistheanswe and Borikensalsero.... listening, feeling and self-expression. With the music, yourself and listening to your partners feelings and their self-expression.

Also, as Boriken says, it's natural and within us, so doesn't require technical learning, just the bravery to let go and let it out. This can be learned at any level, which is why some beginners have it (show it) from the get go. Others are discouraged from this by so called teachers.

Pursuit of technique in musicality often leads to how complex you can make something, whereas feelings and self-expression are often about simplicity while also being rich in emotional content and texture.

As Bruce Lee said, "It is like a finger pointing away to the moon, don't concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory."

youtube.com/watch?v=sDW6vkuqGLg

 

[azzey]

What is your timescale? If you are in this for life then I really recommend learning the Cuban dances and rhythms, especially the Folkloric dances and Son. The rhythmic patterns all appear in the percussion solos in salsa dura, and they appear in much more extended and varied ways in timba. When you have studied even a little of the orisha dances, then you develop a palette of movements (not moves, movements) that you can draw from and you will feel when the music is drawing from those influences.

Agree with this but would add that focusing on Rumba (Guaguanco) will give you as much, if not more benefit for the time you put in as Folkloric Orishas.

JC: I dance Cuban salsa, Son, Rumba and love Timba as well as LA/Cross-body dances, so I am both biased and somewhat balanced in my viewpoint.

 

[crazygirl]

I used to do so, but now only if I have not heard the song before and it's great and sometimes for solos. Rather I'd go to DJ booth after dance and ask, what was it. Not all DJs like to share their "secrets", but some do. Or ask more experienced dancers for artist name or at least genre.

Or simply use the high tech, no fuss solution of using an app on your phone for a few seconds to identify the track. Not guaranteed for the obscure but pretty good.

 

[sweavo]

Agree with this but would add that focusing on Rumba (Guaguanco) will give you as much, if not more benefit for the time you put in as Folkloric Orishas.

Oh yes! But on the "lifetime" scale I'd get the orishas under my belt before tackling guaguanco

 

[Francisco]

* It'd be really great if we can get rid of this idea of layering "styling" and "musicality" that goes on top, like some icing. Technique is just the empty plate. You can have a cake without a plate, it'll just be messy!
But you can't have a dance without flavour and music. You get your technique plate from someone else and then you build your creation be it pie, cake, salad, pasta or whatever else it is you want to make on it. So many people get trapped admiring how shiny their plates are, forgetting that the end goal is to make things so that people don't even see the plate. The kind of dancing that blows you away is the stuff you just don't understand!! I say make sure your plate is big and great but only so that it can hold all the stuff you want to do!

I like this way of thinking... nice :notworthy:

 

[azzey]

Oh yes! But on the "lifetime" scale I'd get the orishas under my belt before tackling guaguanco

Gotcha. On the lifetime scale I'd become a professional Salsa dancer then professional Salsa musician then professor of Salsa (there'd be a Salsa University by then!).. if I lived long enough.