How to Count Music for Dance for Absolute Beginners

all right guys welcome back to balm feed today we're going to be talking about how to count the beats and the music to dance to it so let's jump right in all right guys so counting music can be the hardest thing when you're starting out especially if you didn't grow up playing an instrument or dancing or anything like that so the first thing we want to try to do is actually find the beat in the music which sounds silly but if you're just clapping to a song you naturally find the beat and sometimes people are more challenged than others i suggest doing this with a group of people maybe somebody who has some music knowledge or just a song that you are already familiar with and has a hard-hitting beat so just try to clap to the music first without even trying to count anything just finding that hard-hitting beat and then the next step we'll go over with chris we typically count music in beats of four and eight four is the simplest way to count it because without getting too detailed there's four beats in every measure of music right there are some dances that count in threes like waltz or viennese walls but most dances count in beats of four right so one count to the music we start we go one two three four and we can repeat that over and over again one two three four and then sometimes we count in eights because of how music is phrased is a very repetitive pattern that you get in music very often where every eight counts is a new phrase in the music and the four eight counts is an even bigger phrase in the music there is a difference between the one count and the five count music which is why we count eights a lot of the time and you can do more things and make it clear in your head by using different numbers and always repeating one through four every single time you'll notice on the channel that we count a lot of our dances in fours because it's very repetitive and clear and you can make a lot of the same rules work for the same numbers where you'll see in a lot of our choreographies the full on dance routines that we have for you guys we use eights a lot of the time because it's clearer and easier to learn a longer section of choreography and use a more diverse grouping of numbers instead of just one two three four over and over again right but music is typically phrased in eight beats and we go one two three four all the way through to five six seven eight which is why would you hear people count five six seven eight and now we start on the one again because we never go past eight with a nine and a ten okay so the next few is just kind of repeating what we said before so now that you've hopefully been able to clap to the beat which is just finding the natural beat in the song and then being able to add numbers to that whether or not you found the one or not now the next is to practice to find the one or the first beat in the music and the way we can do this easily is by starting the song and as soon as the first beat hits start counting one so there are some songs that will change phrasing a bit and then you will have to do like instead of a full eight it'll go down to a four and then back up to an eight so it is easier to start just count just by counting and fours so that way you never really run into that problem but you want to start with a song that you're familiar with so you'll kind of already be able to find the beat without really thinking about it and you'll know when the song starts so if you start with a song you know find the beat right away and start counting one once you've found it easy to clap to and the next couple tips are really just to find a song a that you know find a song that has an easy beat to hear it's not like a soft piano song some pop music something with hard-hitting sounds that is easy to clap to that's the first thing and then of course you just gotta practice this so it takes time and it does take some practice to different kinds of music so the most popular form of music obviously is upbeat it's the pop music you hear on the radio top 40 a lot of weddings and parties will play this kind of upbeat fast music and most of the time those songs have those easy beats to find because it's meant to be danced too so there's easy beats and usually it's pretty consistent so what we're going to do now is do a little practice exercise where we're going to play some basic beats and we're going to try to clap to it together and then i'll start counting it with you okay but we also recommend practicing this with a either musical person friend in your life maybe a dancer or if you are taking ballroom dance lessons something like this you can always ask your instructor to guide you through it but this is a great place to start okay guys so what we're gonna do is we're gonna play a song that we found that has a pretty clear beat it's fb so hopefully you guys can hear it with us okay so what we're gonna do is we're gonna start clapping and i'm gonna start on the one and then chris is gonna help us start counting to the music and practicing and you can jump in along with us for the practice [Music] [Applause] [Music] one okay three four five six seven eight and you can keep doing this for practice but this is just an exercise to kind of get you started and see if you can pick up the beat with us okay so you can try this with all different kinds of music of course but this is a good place to start so i hope this helped you and i hope it gave you some ideas of how to get you started on how to count music exactly and we'll do some more very specific videos for each dance style again so comment down below which dance style you're maybe wanting to know exactly and we'll do that for you okay thank you guys so much for watching this if you liked it be sure to comment down below and let us know what dance you want us to count specifically because we are going to get into some of the specific dance styles and teach you how to count to those kinds of music and stay tuned for that and be sure to check out all of our website content for just technique dances choreographies all that stuff and we'll see you again in the next one bye [Music]

Channel: Ballroom Feed

Views: 13,062

Keywords: How to Count Music for Dance, ballroom feed, dance lessons online free, how to count music, how to count music beats, how to count music for choreography, How to count music beats for dance, count music beats, how to dance to the music, how to find the beat in music, how to find the beat of a song, how to find the beat in music for dancing, how to find the beat of any song, learn to count beats in music, how to dance on the beat, counting music, counting music for dance

Id: IDNElGJMC4U

Length: 5min 45sec (345 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 27 2021