Salsa Music Basics

For a long time I have been watching people while they are dancing in the clubs. There are people who have taken 5-6 levels of salsa classes; still, they don't seem to understand the music very well; when I talk to them, they say that they were not taught about the music and learned finding the beats in the music by themselves.

The truth is salsa is a hard music to discover on your own, because there are many instruments and voices on top of its base rhythm; and there are various base rhythms which are played on different beats. Dancing a while, we all start to feel the music and will be able to find the famous "one" through feeling and listening, but just like Salsa Dancing, Salsa Music is something you can totally learn about, and when you learn the music and its characteristics, it becomes much easier to find the beats while listening.

Learning to find the beats through gut feeling is the same thing as learning to dance in clubs; we all know that's not how it works.

That's why I've decided to write a series of articles about Salsa Music, its history and origin, instruments contributing in its formation, etc. I would like to clarify that my opinion is not a professional musician’s opinion and my only concern is to help beginner students learn and understand salsa music as they develop their dancing techniques.

Characteristics:

As you might know, Salsa Music is played in common time, which is four beats in every bar. The music is played in two bar phrases, thereby forming an eight-count. In New York style salsa, which is the dancing style we teach in our classes, Dancing Steps take place on 1,2,3 ~ 5,6,7 and counts 4 and 8 have a pause for weight transfer. If you imagine a ruler, you can visualize the beats as shown below.

1st Bar 2nd Bar

Origin:

There are different ideas about where the salsa music comes from. But according to Wikipedia, "Salsa's roots can be traced back to enslaved Africans that were brought to the Caribbean by the Spanish as slaves". Read more This goes back to 1930s; however, Salsa dancing was not officially born until 1960s and 70s in New York City. As a matter of fact, a Manhattan-based recording company introduced many of the first-generation salsa singers and musicians to the world. [Same ref.]

Instruments and Rhythm

This is the main criteria I want to dig into. In order to understand the music and learn to count with it, you need to understand its components. In order to hear each layer separately, go to this link. This is a very effective and useful simulator that you can use to understand salsa music components. Most salsa music songs have a base of clave or conga rhythm.

Clave: The word clave is Spanish for "key", in the sense of an answer key or a musical key signature. The word is usually pronounced [ˈklaβe] in the Spanish style, but many American musicians pronounce it to rhyme with save. Read more

Clave rhythm is the foundation of salsa; all salsa music and dance is governed by the clave rhythm. The most common clave rhythm in salsa is son clave, which is eight beats long and can be played either in 2-3 or 3-2 style. The one you can hear in Salsamerlizer is the 2-3 style playing on 2,3,5,6.5,8 beats. As you can see you can count it as 2 3 5 & 8 (pam pam pam pam pam). The 3-2 style goes: 1 & 4 6 7 (pam pam pam pam pam) Going back to our ruler, here is how each rhythm looks like:

Listen to some sample music and try to figure out the clave style in them. Rehearse this as much as you can with different songs. If you can understand the music, you can find the beats and can dance on rhythm, which is much more important than knowing a large number of moves! I want to emphasize again: good dancers aren't good because the know lots of moves; they are good because they know how to dance with music. I'll talk about other instruments next week.