Hi,
I am a DJ learning to host ballroom dancing.
I would greatly appreciate any help in understanding the various tempos of the main types of ballroom dancing. If anybody knows of a good listing of the tempos or can produce one, I would greatly appreciate it.
Also, I notice that the tempos seem to be counted differently than tempos of popular music. Are they counted by measure, or beat?
Thanks for any help!

DJ Kevin
http://allamericandj.com

James,

You are way too humble, man !!!

Your website has been ONLY visited 26,555 times. I found it very useful, and I thank you for your valuable site.

Hi, Kevin:

Go to ballroomdancers.com main page and check on each dances, scroll down to the music or click on the music section, you will find the description of each dances as how many beats per minute.

There are some websites that have complete section of music descriptions but I am not able to find it at this moment. I did check James' website without results. James, can you help?

Hi, Kevin:

I used to frequent Tuesday night's dances and occasional Sundays at the Gold Coast. That's about some 5-6 years ago. And know of Larry Taylor even back in the days of Disco era, he was "the" DJ at the most popular disco house, "Brewery" in the late 70s. Every body who frequented the Brewery knows him even though they don't dance ballroom today.

I am glad that you have the initiatives to learn the correct ballroom dance tempi. As Larry's music collection were old and dated, perhaps that is why he couldn't attract but the elders? Nevertheless, Gold Coast ballroom was always pacted, perhaps it was neccesary that he needed to play the type of musics that suit the crowd. I don't know.

In order for the younger and serious ballroom dancers to go to these dances, Larry needs correct musics. Please view this as my sincere suggestion.

I dance at Dance Charisma at the corner of Jones and Twain, every Friday nights 8-10pm, please come visit if you have time.

Keh, another M Ed.

You know, I hardly ever look at the hit counters on my pages, but they're there should I want to. Hmm, if I do a little calculation, those 26,555 hits over roughly 4 years amounts to something like 17-18 hits per day. I didn't realize that total number of hits averaged out to that many hits/day. I'm kind of surprised, but pleasantly so. I said that about it being popular here though because you're the second person to recently mention my web site specifically. It's one thing to get hits, it's another to know people are recommending your pages to others though. I'm glad to know that my pages are useful and other people find them helpful.

--
James Marshall
marshall@astro.umd.edu
http://www.astro.umd.edu/~marshall

First, yes, dancers usually count tempo differently from the way musicians do. Musicians use beats per minute (bpm) while dancers uses measures per minute (mpm). Measure = bar, but then both get abbreviated the same way and that's confusing. Simple enough conversion though -- mpm * (# beats/measure) = bpm. As for the tempi used, the ones I last saw for competitions purposes are listed below. These could have changed slightly with a newer rulebook that I haven't seen. And of course for social dances you can use a reasonable range around the tempi here (+/- maybe 2 mpm would probably be fine).

International style dances:
Waltz -- 30 mpm (3/4 = 90 bpm)
Tango -- 33 mpm (2/4 = 66 bpm; 4/4 = 132 bpm)
Viennese Waltz -- 60 mpm (3/4 = 120 bpm)
Foxtrot -- 30 mpm (4/4 = 120 bpm)
Quickstep -- 50 mpm (4/4 = 200 bpm)
Cha Cha -- 30 mpm (4/4 = 120 bpm)
Samba -- 50 mpm (2/4 = 100 bpm; 4/4 = 200 bpm)
Rumba -- 27 mpm (4/4 = 108 bpm)
Paso Doble -- 62 mpm (2/4 = 124 bpm)
Jive -- 44 mpm (4/4 = 176 bpm)

American style dances:
Waltz -- 28-30 mpm (3/4 = 84-120 bpm)
Tango -- 30-32 mpm (2/4 = 60-64 bpm; 4/4 = 120-128 bpm)
Foxtrot -- 30-32 mpm (4/4 = 120-128 bpm)
Viennese Waltz -- 54 mpm (3/4 = 162 bpm)
Cha Cha -- 30 mpm (4/4 = 120 bpm)
Rumba -- 32 mpm (4/4 = 128 bpm)
East Coast Swing -- 36 mpm (4/4 = 144 bpm)
Bolero -- 24 mpm (4/4 = 96 bpm)
Mambo -- 47 mpm (4/4 = 188 bpm)

I hope this helps.

P.S. -- My web page is getting to be a popular resource around here, isn't it. This is on one of my pages, but I guess it's not obvious where. I put it in my page about competition rules. Look for the link called "very abridged rules" in the "Competition Help" section of my main ballroom page.
--
James Marshall
marshall@astro.umd.edu
http://www.astro.umd.edu/~marshall

Thanks for the quick replies!

Odd to find out that James is a physics guy...in my former incarnation prior to my DJ 'career', I was a high school physics teacher for the last seven years. Have a B.S. in Physics from University of Florida, and M.Ed. in physics education. Long story short...came to Vegas to teach this year, but quit after one week of teaching when they assigned me to teach all low level math classes. Ugh.

Back to the subject at hand...yeah, that makes sense about the tempo counting. I am currently learning from a great ballroom DJ, Larry Taylor at the Gold Coast in Vegas. Its a fun gig, each Tuesday and Sunday 200-300 of the ol' skool Vegas lifers come out for an hour of dance instruction, then 4 hours of dancing. Hope to eventually take over a few nights as my coach needs a night off every now and then.

I have a mobile DJ biz, so am pretty familiar with most types of music, but this is all really pretty new, and I want to do a good job at it. Any tips would be appreciated. I have looked at James' website, seems quite useful.

Look me up if you come to Vegas!

DJ Kevin
http://allamericandj.com