Musicality in West Coast Swing for leaders comes down to this… Your ability to connect your patterns to the music. Once you’ve learned to hear musical phrases, the next step is to start matching th...
For followers, accenting the 1 of the musical phrase is more challenging than for the leaders because you don’t get to pick the pattern that is being led. As a result, you need to have options to a...
We know that we want play to compliment WCS rather than replace it, and we also know that we use play in order to help interpret the music. These two goals actually provide a lot of guidance for wh...
If you’ve followed this series so far, you have spent a lot of time listening to music and counting out musical phrases. However, counting to 32 or 48 is not realistic when you’re actually dancing,...
In last week’s post, we practiced using two-beat extensions within basic patterns. Now it’s time to apply that technique in order to phrase the music. The Drill: First, listen to Sweet Sixteen by J...
In an earlier post, we talked about chord progressions in pop music. The standard pop chord progression relies on I, IV, and V chords to create tension and resolve. In this post, we’re going to com...
WCS is a two-beat dance. As a result, it is easy to extend patterns by two beats in order to phrase the music. In order to remain on the same foot, we’ll use a double rhythm unit to extend the patt...
At this point, you know that (WCS) music is written in eight beat phrases and you know how to point on the 1 of each phrase. Now it’s time to talk about why we point on the 1. This will require som...
WCS patterns don’t neatly fit into musical phrases. We dance six and eight count patterns, yet our songs have accents on the first beat of each eight beat phrase. Being able to acknowledge those ac...
When you learned WCS, you learned to distinguish downbeats and upbeats. In musical terms, the downbeat and upbeat are quarter note rhythms: they take up a quarter of a measure, which is the divisio...
