I'm loving this discussion too! It took me a while when I started calling, to realize how the dancers and the musicians count differently-- In our group we always listen to a full added-on A1 as an intro- ie 16 beats of music-- and that's what I tell our beginner dancers: "We're going to listen to 16 beats of music and then start dancing" .
But what the musicians seem to need to hear, if they are new to our group, is "We need you to play 8 *bars* of extra music as an intro" . Until I figured this out, I was asking the musicians for 16 beats, and they were playing 16 bars, and everything got messy! But Rich's comment below has got me interested in hearing from more people about their typical range of tempos- it's something I've recently started thinking more deeply about-- Now when I do my dance outline, I set a target tempo in bpm for each dance, to help our musicians select an appropriate tune for each (I went to a great workshop last summer where I learned that some tunes, like irish reels, sound fast but actually tend to be among the slower-tempo'd tunes -- and most of our musicians struggle to play them faster than 110bpm- making them a poor choice for a lot of the simple, high-energy dances that our group does.) Rich Goss wrote: "The sweet spot for most dances is 116bpm (beats per minute). The range is generally 108-120. For a one night stand, I would shoot for the low end." So I've been keeping track over the last year, -- asking my bands to report to me after each dance, whether we danced at the target tempo I had set, or something faster or slower than it... I would say in our group, our typical easy dances run with a tempo of 112-120 - even for total beginners.. and some dances in the middle of the evening get up to 125+, with all the high energy in the hall. It's actually our more challenging dances towards the end of the evening, (which are not very challenging for most of y'all, but we are a basic-level group!) that end up going slower- when we put in heys and other flowy moves, then we get into more groovy-feeling tunes in the 105-110bpm range. Would love to hear about other groups' tempo ranges! Kat K in Halifax, NS, Canada
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