Beginners in particular often find it difficult to recognize which dance they can dance to the song being played on the dance floor. You shouldn’t worry because of this – many dancers have difficulty recognizing the dance given the music.
In this post we explain how you can narrow down which ballroom dance goes with the song using 3 steps. We will focus on the dances that are most relevant for you as a beginner:
- Slow Waltz
- Waltz
- Samba
- Cha-Cha-Cha
- Rumba
- Jive
- Discofox
- Tango
- Quickstep
Step 1: Recognize time signature
The three most common time signatures in ballroom dancing are 2/4, 3/4 and 4/4 beats. The easiest way to recognize the time signature is to count from the accented note of the song until the next accented note appears. You can usually hear this particularly well in a waltz, where an accented note (=1) is followed by two unaccented notes (=2 and 3). In this case, there are 3 notes. Therefore, this is a 3/4 beat.
Once you have identified the time signature, the list of possible dances can be narrowed down:
- 4/4 beat: Rumba, Cha-Cha-Cha, Discofox, Jive and Quickstep
- 3/4 beat: Waltz and Slow Waltz
- 2/4 beat: Tango and Samba
Step 2: Estimate the song tempo
Next, you need to pay attention to the tempo of the song to further narrow down the type of dance. For the sake of simplicity, we distinguish between 3 different categories here: fast, medium and slow. To decide which category your song should be in, you can look at the beats per minute (BPM). Slow songs have up to 120 BPM, medium songs up to 150 BPM, and fast songs from 150BPM – although you shouldn’t take the limits too exact.
This brings us to the following classification:
- Rather slow: Tango, Samba, Slow Waltz, Rumba
- Rather medium: Discofox, Cha-Cha-Cha, Jive
- Rather fast: Waltz, Foxtrot, Jive, Quickstep
The jive can be assigned to the rather medium as well as to the rather fast category.
Step 3: Recognize the rhythm
Once you have made a pre-selection of which dance you are looking for, you can now narrow it down further by listening to the rhythm of the song. The song has to match the dance rhythm so that you can dance to it. This step is the most difficult because you have to develop a feeling for the different rhythms of ballroom dance songs.
To recognize the rhythm, you have to pay attention to how long the individual notes are played. These can be played fast or slowly. There are also “and” notes, which are twice as fast as fast notes. In our opinion, it’s best if you don’t just memorize the rhythms for different songs, but listen to different dance songs to get a feeling for the respective rhythm. In the next section, we give you a hint on the easiest way to do this.
The path to success: practise, practise and practise
To become a ballroom dance expert, you need to practise a lot. To do this, you can attend dance parties and try to find the right dance yourself. However, you will be very distracted and influenced by the other dancers, and some of the songs may not be suitable for you to dance to as a beginner.
Another method of practicing and mastering dance recognition is the DanceBeat app. In the app, there is a quiz in which a song is played and you have to guess which dance you can dance to the song. This allows you to practice many different songs in a short time and quickly learn to assign songs to the correct dance category!
Get the app now:
