Timing Exercises Vol 3 - Footwork for Salsa and Mambo

Timing Exercises Vol 3 Description

This DVD includes a number of exercises designed to develop your musicality and improve the speed, agility and precision of your footwork in Salsa and Mambo.  The idea behind all this is very simple: imagine your feet are percussive musical instruments.  If the imaginary sound they make matches the music, it follows that you are in time with the music; that the footwork you execute is interesting and, most importantly,  it looks natural -  since it fits the rhythm you are dancing to.  It is much like flamenco and tap dancing.  The only difference is that you do not worry about the actual sound of your feet, which no one in a salsa club would hear anyway, you just develop the awareness of what your feet do, when you dance.
The DVD includes 4 types of exercises.  

The first type involves stepping to strong, weak and syncopated beats.  This helps to familiarise you with the idea behind this DVD and to ensure you start focussing on the relationship between your footwork and the sound they try to match.  These initial exercises are very easy, but the syncopation in Exercise 3 will already challenge intermediate dancers and possibly some advanced ones.

The second type of exercises is about stepping to the sound of three fundamental salsa instruments: clave, conga and bass.  While in the DVD: Timing Exercises Vol 1 & 2, you learnt to clap and to execute the basic steps to the rhythm of these instruments, here we learn to literally move with them.  This will further develop your understanding of their rhythm.  Once again, the exercises may look simple but stepping precisely and correctly to the bass, for example, will not be as trivial as it looks.  Be prepared to be challenged very early on.

The third set of exercises has a faster pace and aims to develop speed and agility.  These are needed not just to dance to fast music, but they are essential to make you look smooth and effortless when you dance to slower salsas.

Finally, the last set of exercises is based on free style rhythm patterns, including some common and some less common phrasing.  These may look like shines and you can surely use them as such.  However, they were designed to be different.  Firstly, they are much shorter than traditional shines, covering only 2 bars of music.  As a result, they are much easier to remember. Secondly, their focus is not styling, in order to attract attention, but rhythm, in order to make your dancing be one with the music.  They are inconspicuous and as such you can think of them as perfect shines for shy people J.  Thirdly, since they are so short, you can fit them anywhere in your dancing, even in between your partner work, not necessarily in your solo work.
There are 27 exercises in total and this is how you use the DVD to learn the footwork.  For each exercise there are 4 clips.  First, you listen to the rhythm pattern and check that you understand it by clapping to it.  You can do this by following the instructor to verify that you clap this rhythm correctly.  Once this is under control, we break down the footwork very slowly, so you can follow it, literally, step by step.  This, like all clips, loops continuously so you can exercise for as long as you need.  All instructions are provided visually on the screen, which means that if you need to pause the DVD at any time you still can read the instructions.  Once you have learnt the footwork, you can practise it first with a slow and then with a medium pace salsa rhythm.  In these clips you can still hear a rhythm guide which marks each step of the footwork; you can use this guide to ensure that your footwork is precise by checking that your steps match the sound of the rhythm guide. Once you are confident you can execute the footwork correctly and precisely, you can practise it without the rhythm guide.

We produced this DVD to make your learning as simple as possible and the variety of instructions we provide is as close as you can get to having a salsa personal instructor with you at all times.  The DVD navigation is very easy to use and lets you move from one part of the DVD to the next with a single mouse or remote control click.
A natural question to ask: is the DVD on1 or on2?  The answer is a beauty: neither and both!  We use our feet as a musical instruments, and musical instruments are neither on1 nor on2.. they just play.  Similarly, the rhythm patterns upon which the footwork is designed will match any dancing style, you will just dance it.  Only the basic steps in between the footwork are showed on2, but it will be trivial to do them on1, if you need.  

This DVD is one further step along the path which takes you from just executing regular basic steps to freeing your footwork when you dance and being one with the music.  You do not need to see these exercises as ‘shines’ , or set routines to memorise and repeat mechanically when you dance socially, rather as... exercises, that is, tools to develop your speed, agility and, most importantly, your musical awareness so that you can learn to be conscious of what your feet do when you dance.  This is essential so that one day you can develop your own footwork or just improvise. .

How to use the Timing Exercises Volume 3

First, have a look at the Introduction to familiarise yourself with the content of the DVD. Then go the Exercises.  Of course we recommend that you start from the easy ones (Exercises 1-4) but the exercise order is not strictly progressive, so you can jump here and there in the exercise list if so you wish.   Once you have chosen an Exercise, click on “Clap to the rhythm pattern” and ensure that you learn the rhythm pattern.  This is the pattern you will dance to. You can toggle the clapping sound on and off by using the button “Clap sound On” and “Clap sound Off” to test your own clapping.  The clip loops forever, so you can practise for as long as you wish.     Once you are done, click on the ‘’Return to Menu” button to return to the Exercise Menu.       Now choose the “Footwork Breakdown” clip.  This will help you learn the footwork sequence by taking you step by step, very slowly, through it.  Once again, the clip loops forever. Once you have learnt the footwork sequence click on the ‘’Return to Menu” button to return to the Exercise Menu.   Now choose the “Practise at slow pace” clip.  This lets you exercise the footwork sequence to slow music following the instructor.  A rhythm guide will help you recognise the rhythm you need to dance to and to synchronise your footwork to it.  Once you are done click on ‘’Return to Menu”   Now choose the “Practise at medium pace” clip.  Now you can practise what you learnt at a faster pace.  Here you can use the “Rhythm guide On” and “Rhythm guide Off” buttons to toggle the rhythm guide on and off. Once you are done, click on the ‘’Return to Menu” button and proceed to a different exercise.         DVD - $30   top