Tag Archives: Wedding

Special Occasions

We’d like to dance a “real” partner dance as the first dance at our wedding (Part II: We already chose our dance)

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Last time I wrote about how music4dance can help you find a dance to match the song you’d like to dance to for your first dance (or other wedding dances). This time, I’ll cover how the site can help you find a song if you already know what dance style you want to dance. Before I dig into that, I’d like to repeat that your local dance studio and your wedding DJ are both excellent sources of ideas.

Since I first wrote about this idea early a decade ago, I’ve made some improvements to the site. The easiest way to find wedding songs that match your dance is to go to the wedding music page (Music -> Wedding on the main menu). There you’ll find a table of dance styles and types of wedding dance. The cells in that table have a number that represents the number of songs we have cataloged for that dance style and also tagged with the type of wedding dance. Click on the number to get to a list of songs where you can play samples and find the full version of the song on Spotify, Apple Music, or Amazon.

The wedding music page is just a shortcut to using the advanced search tool. If you want to search for something unavailable in the wedding dance table, you can do the same type of search using the tool. For instance, I haven’t added Mother/Daughter songs to the table as of this writing. But a few people have tagged songs as Mother/Daughter. So you could go to the advanced search tool, include the tag “Mother Daughter,” optionally choose a dance, and see what comes up.

In addition, when you do an advanced search, you can find the search again on your search page. And if you’re a premium subscriber, you can export results as a Spotify playlist to listen through the songs at your convenience.

I hope this helped. And if you’ve got suggestions for other wedding-related tags, please consider becoming part of the music4dance community and adding your wedding songs to the catalog with whatever tags make sense to you – they’ll be helpful to someone else in the future.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback, so please share any thoughts and ideas about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

Special Occasions

We’d like to dance a “real” partner dance as the first dance at our wedding (Part I: We already chose our song)

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Wedding season is upon us, and one of the things that come with weddings is receptions with first dances, father/daughter dances, mother/son dances, mother/daughter dances, and any other variation you can think of. I think it’s extra special when those dances are recognizably partner dances like Foxtrot, Rumba, or Swing. Of course, I have a bit of a bias.

If you want to find a dance that fits the song you love, here are some things that can help. In my next post, I’ll cover the other direction – finding a song to fit your dance.

First, consider visiting your local dance studio and asking a professional. The other professional that could help is your wedding DJ; sometimes, they are also dance teachers or at least know a dance teacher to connect you with.

In tandem with going to a professional, some features of music4dance.net can help. The first is to try searching for your song – you can type the title into the search box in the menu bar or on the Song Library page. If it’s a particularly popular song, you might also include the artist to see if you can get to the specific version of the song. But oftentimes, variations on a song by different artists still maintain enough of the same characteristics to be danced to the same dance. So be creative in your search and see what you come up with.

For example, try typing “Fly me to the moon” into the search bar – including the quotes to get songs with that full title rather than all the songs with those keywords. And we’re probably most interested in the Frank Sinatra version, so scroll down to that or add Sinatra (outside of the quotes) to the search.

You can already see which dances folks in the music4dance community have voted on to dance to this song. There is quite a spectrum. If you click on the song title, you will get more details. Among other things that will show you that Slow Foxtrot is the most-voted dance for this song, some folks have voted for East Coast Swing and Jive but have noted that it’s slow for those dances. That’s not necessarily bad; you could speed up the song a bit (modern technology is fantastic) and get it to something still slow for ECS but not crazy slow – which might be just the right tempo for a first dance.

But what if you can’t find the song in the music4dance catalog? There is another tool that can provide some help. Try looking at the tempo counter tool (and its help page). Counting out the song’s tempo in this tool will show you which dances can technically be danced to the song. The tempo counter result doesn’t tell you anything about if the style of the song fits the dance. But this is also pretty interesting because if you’re going to go all the way and choreograph a first dance, sometimes doing something that’s a little out of a stylistic mismatch can be pretty effective. Choreographing a dance to a song that doesn’t quite fit is frequently done with showcase dances like those you see on Dancing with the Stars and can be very effective in creating a memorable wedding dance.

I hope this helped and that you really enjoy your first dance, not to mention the rest of your wedding and reception.

If you used the second method I mentioned or the help of a professional to find a song/dance combination for any of your wedding dances, please consider becoming part of the music4dance community and adding your wedding songs to the catalog.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback, so please share any thoughts and ideas about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

P.S. This is a reboot of a very early blog post I wrote in 2015. Since the site has been through a couple of significant over-hauls since I wrote the first pair of wedding music posts, I think it’s worthwhile revisiting them. I may end up doing a more systematic rewrite. In that case, I’ll try to figure out a better way to index the posts to remove duplicates and/or make the fresher content pop up ahead of the old content.

Special Occasions

Valentine’s Day Edition: Love Songs that We Love to Dance to

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I’ve been making an effort to tag songs and write sophisticated searches to find good songs for holiday dances. The music4dance catalog is set up for this kind of search. Not only that, but I’ve always really enjoyed doing exhibition pieces for holiday parties.

I started with the Christmas/Winter holidays and added Halloween more recently. I hadn’t really thought about Valentine’s Day. But when I did (a little late for this year, but never too early to be planning for next year), I realized that I already had something pretty useful: What better place to look for love songs than a wedding music catalog. Which, coincidently, I’ve spent some time building up.

So if you’re looking for love songs to dance to, check out the Wedding Dance page and let me know what you think. This time of year, there are plenty of generic lists of Love Songs, so if I get some feedback that you’d like a more general list of danceable love songs, I can do some cross-indexing with one or more of those lists. And of course, you can always start adding songs and/or tagging existing songs with a “Love Song” tag and create your own lists.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback, so please share any thoughts and ideas you have about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way that makes sense for you.

Archive

What is Your Favorite music4dance Feature?

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I’m in the middle of doing a substantial rewrite of music4dance to modernize it and, hopefully, clean up the code enough that I can start adding new features without breaking things.  I had originally intended to keep all of the functionality of the site as I moved forward.  But this has been a bigger undertaking than I anticipated.  In additional, the original site grew somewhat organically, so there are multiple ways of doing things that weren’t so much designed as grown. I’m not sure that it makes sense to preserve all of the different ways of doing the same thing.

Right now I am rewriting the core song list functionality that is used on all or the pages that (surprise) list songs.  This includes the main song library, all of the dance pages, and the holiday music pages.  In addition the results of advanced search and the pages that you navigate to from many of the other pages like the wedding music, tags, and the ballroom dance pages will be affected by this round of changes.  And I’m finding it difficult to reproduce all of the existing functionality while keeping the code clean enough to feel like I can move forward.  Not to mention that I’m itching to get through this to start writing new features.

So, before I arbitrarily start cutting things, I thought I’d ask:  How do you use music4dance?  What are your favorite features?  Please let me know, so I don’t go and remove something that I don’t think is essential, but that is the reason that you love the site.

Please reply to this post or send feedback with your favorite features or a description of how you use the site.

Quick Tip: You can share your searches.  Any time you create a list of songs, whether that is through using advanced search, or by refining a search in other ways, you can copy the URL out of the browsers address bar and share it with friends and fellow dancers.

About music4dance

Musicians for Dancers

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One of the things I enjoy most about the musci4dance project is when I get feedback from people who have found the site useful.  I’m especially happy when it comes from a direction that I don’t expect.  It’s exactly that kind of feedback that I received from Mister “D” (David Simmerly) – a musician who performs for Ballroom clubs and weddings and was looking to expand his repertoire with music that would be well received in those contexts.

I asked Dave to expand a little on how he used music4dance and (paraphrasing) here are a few of the things that he came back with:

The first and second points led to an extended discussion about songs that are listed as Waltzes but are not in 3/4 time – check out my blog post on “Fake” Waltzes for more on that.

But there is a more general point that I would like to make here with respect to “correctness” of music for dance.  I’ve compiled this catalog with an eye for finding music that inspires dancers to dance.  This makes for a very loose definition of what songs “work” to dance a particular dance to.  In a setting where a dancer is choreographing to a specific piece of music, even when that choreography is a traditional ballroom dance like in Dancing With the Stars, there is quite a bit of latitude in what music will “work”.  Whereas in a social situation the dancers are more dependent on the beat and feel of the music to enjoy the experience of partnering in a specific dance style.  And then of course when one is dancing competition rounds, there are even stricter rules about tempo.

In any case, I hope that many of the songs in the music4dance catalog fall into the category (as Mr. “D” says) of “making your pants want to get up and dance.”  In the future, I hope to do a better job of tagging dances in a way that separates the strictly ballroom from the fun to choreograph to from the great songs for social dancing.  The system is at least theoretically set up to do this since I’ve enabled arbitrary tagging of songs.  It’s a big project to go through each song in an 11,000+ song catalog and make the kind of distinction I’m talking about here.  On the other hand, it is exactly the kind of thing that works well when others jump in to add their own ideas to the mix.

As always, I welcome your feedback and participation.  Thanks to David Simmerly for permission to use his name and information in this post.  If you’re in the midwest and are looking for a great solo entertainer for your Ballroom Club, Wedding Reception or another occasion, you can find him on gigsalad.com.

Searching for Music

What if I just want to search for songs on music4dance like I do on Google?

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One of the things that I’ve had a lot of fun with is building a sophisticated search engine where I (and you) can do things like find songs that someone has tagged as Waltz and someone else has tagged as Foxtrot.  Or find all swing songs that are in a particular tempo range.  There are lots of neat things that you can do with the Advanced Search system if you’ve got some knowledge of dance and music and want to dig deep into these corners of the music4dance catalog.

But what if you just want to search through the catalog the same way you would on Google or Bing?   For instance, what if you’re looking for a song that has been tagged as Wedding and has the words “Love” and “Time” in it?  With simple search you can just type Wedding Love Time into the search box and you’ll get some useful results.  You can further refine the search by using some of the standard search modifiers like + and – and putting quotes (“) around phrases to be more precise about your searches (for instance try “First Dance” +Foxtrot +Rock).  But if you’re the type that doesn’t bother with that on Google you should be fine not worrying about it here as well.

More information is available on the help page but you should be able to go to Simple Search from the “Music” menu on the music4dance home page and dive right in.

The Google Miniseries:

Searching for Music

I am learning the Foxtrot, where can I find some music?

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The quick answer is to just click this link where you will find a list of over a thousand songs that have been labeled as Foxtrot.

But that’s definitely not the full answer.  In that list you will find songs that are too fast or too slow for you to dance to because the Foxtrot is not just one dance style but a family of dances each of which can be danced to a different range of tempos.

When I first started dancing  my teachers were from a background that was influenced by American Smooth style of Ballroom dance.  So there was a very specific dance that I first learned as “The Foxtrot”.   This is what is more precisely known as American Style Foxtrot and the was danced in the range of 30 measures per minute plus or minus a bit depending on competition rules.

In order to answer the more precise question of what kind of music will work for the dance that you are learning, it helps to get a bit of a historical perspective.  The Foxtrot follows a pretty common pattern in how partner dances evolve.  A style is first danced socially and pulls in moves from multiple traditions.  Often something resembling the social dance is performed on stage by exhibition dancers as well.  As the style becomes established, teachers take it and formalize it and possibly simplify it for their students. Then social dancers start pulling in things from different traditions and the dance evolves.  Sometimes it gets renamed, and sometimes the dance with the same name is just danced differently depending on where and when a dancer learned the style.   And never forget the influence of the music that is evolving alongside the dances, perhaps speeding up or slowing down or changing in character in a way that influences how dancers dance to it.

In the case of the Foxtrot, two of the early influences were Peabody and the Tango.  The Peabody was a very fast “one step” dance, and the Tango was imported from Argentina via Paris.  Harry Fox is the exhibition dancer who lent the Foxtrot his name.  Vernon and Irene Castle are the teachers who first formalized the Foxtrot as well as using it in their performances.

Arthur Murray standardized the particular version of the Foxtrot that I learned.  He also revived the Peabody as a competition dance to occupy the fast end of the Foxtrot style dances, as he felt that it was more reasonable for students to learn than the slightly slower but more complicated Quickstep.

At some point Charleston influences crept in as a style dance-able to faster music developed, called appropriately, the Quickstep.

To round out this family of dance styles I’ve adopted the name Castle Foxtrot to represent the slowest variations.   Much of the music that I’ve cataloged as Castle Foxtrot has been labeled by others as Slow Dance, especially when it relates to Wedding Dances.  Many of the moves that are used in Foxtrot can be slowed down and made to stay in place  (or on spot) to create something that is much more elegant than the side to side swaying that I first “learned” as a slow dance.

Here is a snapshot of the Foxtrot filter of the music4dance Tempi Tool, as a jumping off point to help you find music in an appropriate tempo for your style of Foxtrot.  Just click on any of the tempo ranges to get Foxtrot music in that range.

Name Meter MPM BPM Type Style(s)
Castle Foxtrot 4/4 15-25 60-100 Foxtrot Social
Slow Foxtrot 4/4 28-34 112-136 Foxtrot American Smooth, International Standard
QuickStep 4/4 48-52 192-208 Foxtrot International Standard
Peabody 4/4 60-62 240-248 Foxtrot American Smooth

With the full tool on the music4dance site you can dig further into the relationship between dances and tempos.

Foxtrot was further complicated by the fact that it co-evolved very closely with swing and was often danced to the same music, or at least music played by the same bands.   I’ll take at look at what I’ve been categorizing as the Swing family of dances next.

Does this categorization help you at all in how you think about dancing and how it relates to music.  Is there a different way that you would slice and dice these dances?

One thing that I completely over-simplified in my description was the influence of regional traditions.  Would anyone from around the world care to shed some light on your regional influences to the Foxtrot?

Useful Links:

Archive

Wedding Music Part II: We’re learning to Rumba, help us find a good song for our first dance

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In my last post I showed you how to use the music4dance website if you already had a song in mind that you wanted to use for your first dance, and wanted to figure out which dance style(s) would work with the song. But what if you are particularly in love with one dance style or are just learning to dance one particular style and are looking for an inspiring first dance song in that style?

Let’s take a concrete example. Assume for a moment that you are learning to Rumba, so you’re looking for songs that will work for rumba but are also good songs for a first dance.

  1. Go to the music4dance web site (https://www.music4dance.net).tag-menu-annotated
  2. Choose Music->Tags from the menu at the top of the site by first clicking on Music (A) then on Tags (B).
  3. Click on the “Wedding” tag (C).wedding-tag-page
  4. A menu will pop up, choose the option “List all songs tagged as Wedding.”
    A list of all of the songs in our catalog that have been tagged “Wedding” appears.wedding-dances Since this list includes not only songs tagged as “First dance” but also “Father Daughter” and “Mother Son” tagged songs, let’s further refine our list to just “First Dance” songs.
  5. Click on any “First Dance” tag (D) in the tags column, a small menu will pop up.  Choose “Filter the list to include only songs tagged as First Dance.”  You will now have a list of songs that have been tagged both as “First Dance” and “Wedding.”first-dances
  6. But you are looking specifically for songs that you can dance the Rumba to.  So click on the dance selector button (E) (All Dances) and choose Rumba (F).
  7. You will now have songs that you can dance the rumba to that have been tagged as “Wedding” and “First Dance.”first-rumba
  8. The play button (G) on any song  will give you a list of music streaming and purchase options, which at minimum will let you listen to 30 seconds for free to make sure this is the song you were thinking of at if you’re subscribed to one of the services like Spotify or Groove you can listen to the entire song.
  9. You can click on the title link of any song (H) to get even more details including albums that contain this song.
  10. Or click on the Tempo column header (I) to sort the songs by tempo.

Is the style of dance you’re interested in not included please leave a comment or take a few minutes to go through my dance classification survey and help me generalize this system to the style of dance that you know.