I'm always on a quest to find more great music. Recently, a dance friend sent me a link to Pandora.com, telling me that it's a cool radio station, but I basically blew her off by saying, "I have 30 years of music in my collection, so I appreciate the suggestion, but I doubt I'll listen to it."
With XM satellite radio at home and a premium system in my car, one more station didn't sound very promising. I decided I should check it out for a few minutes, just to "be nice" and not totally blow off her suggestion.
Boy, was I wrong. Pandora is a different concept and worth checking out. I'm a little late to the party, as Pandora claims it has over 30 million subscribers so far. I'd never heard of it. (It's playing in the background for me as I write this article.)
Pandora starts with your preferences and builds from there. You tell it songs or artists you like, and it creates your custom "station(s)" finding other songs that match your preferences. They call these example tunes or artists "seeds," and they shape the station's starting point.
Conventional radio stations establish their own play list, trying to predict what tunes will relate to their chosen audience and attract more listeners (and advertisers).
In Pandora, after seeding a station with some examples, it finds similar music and you start listening. You continue to refine the station with a "Thumbs Up" or "Thumbs Down" icon on each playing tune. If you give the current tune a thumbs up, you hear the tune more often, and it finds similar songs in its vast database. If you dislike a tune and give it a thumbs down, Pandora won't play it again, and it avoids playing songs that are similar to the ones you dislike.
Over time the station plays more music you like and less you dislike, which greatly improves its value. You can also add additional seeds if you want more variety in the station or create different stations for your different moods.
In addition, you can share your stations with your friends, and they can start with your preferences but modify to create their own version if desired. Soon the station reflects their tastes rather than yours.
Pandora has a decent set of genre stations, including "salsa" in the "Latin" category, so you could easily start with their stations and tune it to your liking. I'm impressed with the generic version, and as a test I set up a few of my own. (I'll share a couple stations I created toward the bottom of this article.)
If you start with any existing station, once you thumbs-up/down a tune, the station becomes yours, and you can modify the station name and/or add your favorite tunes, refining its play list to suit your tastes.
Below are a few test stations I set up. If you don't modify them, they remain "mine" and will update with any changes I make in the future. (I'm not sure why you care what I like, I'd modify to to your tastes if I were you...)
Salsa: Modified Started with "genre" station, Latin > Salsa and used thumbs up/down to refine.
Salsa: Marc Anthony & Friends Started with Marc Anthony as the seed artist, then gave thumbs up to songs I liked. Added a couple seed tunes.
Slow Groove Modern R&BStarted with Craig David and Usher, then refined with thumbs up/down.
If you start new stations (which I recommend), I find it generally does better with specific songs rather than specific artists. Most artists have a wide range of tunes, and I rarely like all their material. Starting with some favorite songs gives the station specific examples, and that's worked really well for me. In a couple cases artists have worked for me, so if one method isn't giving you what you want, try the other or combine artists and specific tunes.
I've have found a set of great tunes I had never heard before. Sometimes I find alternate versions of tunes I like, sometimes just tunes that are new to me.
For example, I have some Usher tunes I like, but I never listened to his much older material. Pandora found the tune, "How Do I Say" based on some of my other tunes and that song was featured in my last "Musicial Pulse" article. I doubt I would have found that tune on my own, but I love it. Pandora also found 20 other new tunes for me the first month, and I already have an extensive collection. There are links for buying tunes on iTunes or Amazon, so you can easily download your new favorites for your iPod.
Pandora pays royalties just like other radio stations, so if you're a heavy user (more than 40 hours per month) you have to either pay an extra 99 cents per month (when you go over 40 hours) OR upgrade to their premium version for $36 per year. If one month you listen to less than 40 hours of music, it's totally free. They warn you if you are close to exceeding the 40 hours, so you can stop listening until the next month, or pay the dollar and continue unlimited for the month. You can (and should) pause the station if you're not listening; that makes it easier to keep listening free.
Because of music licensing issues, Pandora is only available in the United States. I hope they can change this at some point, but for now that's the official word. (Thanks to David S. for pointing that out to me, I had no idea.)
IMPORTANT: We do NOT dance in this class. You learn how to tune your ears so your dancing will reflect more of the music. You can't dance to music you're not hearing.
Everybody can develop a deeper connection with the music.
This is part 2 of a series. I recommend you check out the first article before reading this one. Additionally, this article may include a couple musical terms that unfortunately remain undefined. I avoid doing that, but sometimes it happens for space considerations. Feel free to ask questions if anything is unclear.
As we discussed in Part 1 of this article, dance music has a pulse behind the scenes. Sometimes the music is very explicit, but just as often, the musicians are feeling the pulse, even if they don't beat you over the head with it. Please go back and listen to the example links in Part 1 if you haven't heard them in a while.
This article focuses on "implicit" or "implied" pulse, where the pulse is still consistent behind the scenes, but the musicians don't mark each count of the music. This is a more advanced concept and many people won't hear the implicit pulse without some simple one-on-one training and lots of practice.
Once you know the pulse exists and hear it in some tunes, it becomes more obvious across a wider range of music. It's always there ticking behind the scenes; it's a matter of figuring it out and connecting the dots with the clues the musicians give you. Dancers use this implicit pulse to provide a stronger connection with the music.
Many tunes have sections that are explicit and others that are implicit, and musicians are free to mix as they see fit.
A similar concept is a clock with a ticking second hand. A clock can be silent (implicit), but there is still a pulse 60 times per minute as the second hand moves from one second to the next. Some have an explicit tick-tick-tick sound every second, marking the time in perfectly spaced intervals. Whether you hear the ticking each second or not, the seconds are still ticking by at regular intervals. There is EXACTLY the same amount of time between each second ticking, and on some clocks you can hear each second tick and some clocks are silent.
Music is similar, with the pulse being more or less obvious, depending on the tune.
A Clock With Second Hand Pulsing Each Second
(OK... for the purist; modern electronic clocks often use quartz crystals which vibrate/pulse tens of thousands of times per second. They use electronics to count the pulses and group them into seconds (or fractions) for the display. For our discussion, we are interested in the consistent pulse occurring each second.)
When recording music, some musicians have a "click track" playing in their headsets that is NOT heard in the final recording. This is like a ticking clock or consistent cow bell, generally adjusted to click at the quarter note pulse of the music. The click track provides a reference pulse while recording, keeping the musicians perfectly on time, even if no drums or percussion are playing.
Drummers and some others in the band use the click track as an absolute reference for the underlying pulse of the music. As a listener you don't hear the click track, but it's often a silent partner in the recording process.
When you hear the Usher tune below, there is a beautiful guitar and voice introduction, with 8 bars (measures) of implicit pulse. There are no drums or percussion marking the time, but the musicians are all counting it in their heads. It's highly likely the guitarist had a click track playing in his headphones, and if you march in place to the music you'll see it's perfectly in time.
Usher - "How Do I Say" Introduction Has Implicit Pulse
The pulse is consistent from the beginning to the end of the tune, even if it's not explicit in the first 8 bars. Musicians will often say, "Time is running," to alert the other musicians that the pulse is constant, like a clock, even if nobody is playing the pulse directly.
Some tunes start with an introduction in which time is NOT running, and the musicians speed up and slow down, until the introduction ends, then time is running constantly the rest of the tune.
The end of a tune is another place it's common to ignore the pulse; musicians will often slow down the last few notes for emotional effect, effectively ignoring the pulse as it ends. Musicians can ignore the pulse in the middle of tunes, but that is very, very rare in dance music.
IF you have enough experience with music, the pulse will be obvious in the first couple of bars. In the last couple bars of the intro the guitarist "lays back" and makes it feel like he's slowing down, even though the time remains perfectly constant as it resolves into the next section. In other words, time is running from the first note of the introduction for this example, and it never stops.
Don't be bothered if you have to listen to the introduction over and over to get it right. I've heard the tune over 140 times this month, and I'm still finding new things I didn't hear before. (Great music has depth, and you'll hear new things over time.)
I could hear the pulse in the introduction the first couple times I heard it, but I had to listen to it again to verify I was right about time running from the start. It's normal to hear something, then listen again many times to confirm your gut feel about the pulse.
Musicians (and dancers) are not slaves to the click or the time; they are free to play ahead or behind the click if they want that feel, but they use the pulse as a "home base" and return to it most of the time. If they get too far off the pulse, speed up or slow down, that doesn't work for dance music.
Unlike the tunes in Part 1 of this article, the Usher drum track is a bossa-nova feel, with the bass drum playing a consistent groove which marks count 1 regularly, but dances around the pulse for a totally different feel compared to the explicit pulse examples.
An excellent strategy when you can't find the pulse in one part of the tune is find another similar section where the pulse is clearer. It's normal to find a very clear section in the middle or end of a tune and use that as a guide for figuring out earlier sections of the tune.
Master the pulse in the easy section, then go back to the introduction or the part that is unclear to you, and you'll have a much stronger chance of hearing the details. For example, I like the section from around :45 to 1:18 to figure out the underlying pulse.
If the pulse is not clear in that section of this tune, it probably won't be clear anywhere. You may find another section which is clearer to you. If you are new to finding the implicit pulse, this tune may be too complicated as a starting point.
In "How Do I Say," the shaker player is actually marking the pulse more clearly than any other instrument. He's louder or quieter in different parts of the tune. Check out the shaker player between the 1:07 to 1:17 marks, where his playing is more obvious.
He is playing on each of the dancers' 8 count, but emphasizing the red colored counts below, which includes the pulse plus some variations. (For musicians: he's playing the eighth notes, accenting the quarter notes 3 times, then accenting the 8th notes 3 times as he comes around to 1 again.)
Dancers' 8 Count (rednumber are accents): 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,1 ...
It's subtle and you may need to download this tune and hear it with ear buds and/or quality speakers to hear the details. (The YouTube sound quality is OK, but doesn't compare to the CD version.)
In musicians' count, the pulse of this tune is on 1, 2, 3, 4, even though each count isn't explicitly marked by the musicians.
If you are unfamiliar with the sound of the shaker, here's a clip from one of the leading drum/percussion companies, showing shakers. Notice that the percussionist can emphasize (accent) different patterns as he's playing.
Shakers from Remo
In the Usher tune, the shaker player is playing the same pattern throughout the tune (with minor variations), but because the drummer is also playing a complimentary pattern on his hi-hat, it's much harder to hear the shaker player alone. Their patterns fit together like a puzzle and it takes really advanced ears to break them out at points. The producer brings the shaker volume up in the section referenced above, and has him more in the background (quieter) during the rest of the song.
If you hear the shaker player and you hear the variations he plays, you know your ears are stronger than most. Many people reading this will not hear the details because their ears are not mature enough yet, and/or they need to hear the tune on a better sound system.
For some additional fun, figure out if the introduction is played by 1, 2 or 3 guitars. I thought I had it right the first time I heard it, then changed my mind after about 50 listenings. If you're a musician this will be more obvious, but most people will need to listen to the introduction 20 or more times to be sure they have the right answer. The proper answer is either 1, 2 or 3, so I'll at least give you a 33% chance of guessing correctly. (Guessing isn't the idea; please answer the question when you are willing to bet $25 on it... )
For my clave-aware friends, "How Do I Say" has implied clave until the drummer becomes more explicit with the clave pattern later in the song. (Implied clave is also beyond the scope of this article, but listen to the tune and you'll hear the cross-stick snare drum playing most of a 3-2 clave.) Because implicit or implied pulse is a more advanced concept, I'll provide another example or two in "Part 3" of this series. Few people will get this concept with one song, unless they have prior music experience. If you're not getting it, the question is, can you hear the pulse during the main body of the tune?
Now that you know implicit pulse is behind all dance music, see if you can figure it out in tunes you like. Start with simple music before attempting it in more complex music like salsa.
More examples in Part 3. Let me know what you're hearing in your favorite tunes.
As "The Unlikely Salsero", private/group salsa instructor, dancer and lifelong musician, I specialize in teaching dancers how to hear the time in the music, understand music structure, and relate the music directly to their dancing. Partner dancing is so much more fun when the couple both dance to the music! Dance Salsa "On 1," "On 2" or "On Clave," but be sure you know the music well enough to know that you know! I learned to dance as an adult in my 40's and my primary instruction started with Edie the Salsa Freak; I've worked with many other instructors as well. I've literally performed on stage as a drummer thousands of times and coach others on performance dancing techniques and musicality. A lifelong student of learning/teaching, I've been teaching privately since I was around 18; beginning with drums/music, then computers/software in the 90's, and now salsa, musicality and timing for dancers. I grew up in Detroit and moved to LA at age 21 to study with some of the world's best studio musicians. I graduated from Percussion Institute of Technology (AKA "PIT") in 1982. Starting later than most, I'm living proof that if someone like me can learn to dance, you'll be even better.
Pandora starts with your preferences and builds from there. You tell it songs or artists you like, and it creates your custom "station(s)" finding other songs that match your preferences. They call these example tunes or artists "seeds," and they shape the station's starting point.
