When you’ve mastered hearing upbeats and downbeats in music, you are ready to bring that skill into your pattern work. West coast swing is a two-beat dance, so all patterns are built on the downbeat-upbeat structure. If all you dance is basic, off-the-shelf WCS patterns, you don’t need to know that structure because the dance … Read more
There are some songs that really challenge your ability to keep the beat. Lyrical songs that have vocals but no other instruments, pop songs that hit to silence for more than a couple of beats—if you want to stay on time to these songs, you can’t rely on the music to tell you when the … Read more
In west coast swing, there are three common ways to count music: straight count, rolling count, and swung count. This post will discuss straight vs. rolling counts; a follow-up post will take up the differences between rolling and swung counts. Let’s break them down… At a basic level, music is divided into beats. If you … Read more
200+ Tips & Tricks for WCS
FREE E-Book
for WCS Dancers!
