My friend recently asked for tips to find the 1 beat while swing dancing1. I don’t consciously think about it these days, but I recall not being able to do this when I first started dancing in 2018, so there must be some magical piece of information or some process that made this possible. This post is an attempt to reverse-engineer the trick.
Intensive vs extensive learning
We’re going to steal a concept from language learning called intensive versus extensive learning2. The idea is that acquiring a language (or musical intuition in this case) comes in two primary modes of learning.
Intensive learning entails studying the mechanisms of the language: learning the rules of grammar; checking up words in a dictionary; reading through an article you don’t understand, but going slowly and looking up resources so that you eventually come to understand it.
Extensive learning entails a large volume of exposure: watching movies that you can comfortably comprehend; reading lots of easy-to-understand books; having simple conversations. In other words, consuming effortless media3.
You can split the two methods into language learning vs language acquisition. Both complement each other. Without learning the rules, you don’t know what to pay attention to while exposed to a language. And without sufficient exposure, your neural pathways aren’t reinforced enough for you the produce/comprehend the language without resorting to slow type 2 thinking.
Let’s extend this idea to comprehending swing music4.
Macro structure
Typically in swing music, you have a 4/4 time signature, meaning that you have 4 quarter note beats in a bar. Pair two bars together and you get your basic 8-count.
Lump four 8-counts (i.e. 4 x 2 = 8 bars), and you get a basic 8 bar section.
Lump four 8-bar-sections together (i.e. 4 x 8 = 32 bars), and you get your standard 32 bar song form.
If you listen to 8-bar sections in a song, you’ll notice that each section has kind of musical flow to it. Let’s say the first section is classified by the label A. Similar sections will be labelled A, while differing sections will be labelled B. You would then see popular patterns like AABA or ABAB appear for songs.
AABA
Try listening to As Long As I Live:
“Maybe I can’t live to love you as long as I want to / Life isn’t long enough, baby / But I can love you as long as I live” takes up 8 bars. Let’s call this section A .
“Yeah, maybe I can’t give you diamonds and things like I want to / But I can promise you, baby / I’m gonna want to as long as I live” takes up another 8 bars. If you ignore the words, it feels a lot like the previous section. They’re both very grounded, as if you’re swaying from left to right. Label this section as A too.
“Well, I never cared, but now I’m scared I won’t live long enough / That’s why I wear my rubbers when it rains / Eat an apple every day, then see the Doctor anyway”5 sounds really different. As if the song is taking off. You can really notice this when she sings “I never cared” and “but now I’m scared”. Instead of the side-by-side swaying from the previous sections, these parts feel like they’re insistently traveling in one direction. Then the song completely lifts off at “when it rains / Eat an apple every day, then see the Doctor anyway”. Label this section as B.
“What if I can’t live to love you as long as I want to? / Long as I promise you, baby / I’m gonna love you as long as I live”. We’re back to the grounded swaying feeling, and even the lyrics repeat. This is an A section too.
And so we have a classic example of an AABA structure.
ABAB
Now listen to Fly Me To The Moon:
We can see the structure in this song pretty obviously even from the lyrics:
A – “Fly me to the moon / Let me play among the stars / Let me see what spring is like / On a-Jupiter and Mars”.
B – “In other words, hold my hand / In other words, baby, kiss me”.
A – “Fill my heart with song / And let me sing for ever more / You are all I long for / All I worship and adore”.
B – “In other words, please be true / In other words, I love you”.
Wait but why?
This blog post is clearly titled “finding the one”, so why do we care about these large macro structures in the music? Well humans are really good at navigating relatively, rather than absolutely. This is analogous to finding your location in the world.
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If I told you to go to 37.763349° N, 122.407914° W6, you’d be pretty lost. But if I told you that you’re in San Francisco, and you should Bart down to the 16th St & Mission St stop, then walk down 16th street, passing South Van Ness Ave, until you reach Potrero Ave, then turn right, and turn right again on Mariposa St, you’d do a lot better.
As it goes, knowing where you are in the 32-bar music structure, and identifying the landmarks for 8-bar sections helps you navigate better too. And if you figure out the 1 beat for one 8-bar section, you’ve pretty much figured out the 1 beat for half the song.
If you ain’t got that swing
Let’s talk about micro structure for a moment. One of the characteristics of swing music is that it swings! But what the hell does that mean?
Wikipedia suggests that swing music has a “propulsive quality”, a “feel of a rhythm”, that “prompts a visceral response such as foot-tapping or head-nodding”.
I like to think of it more as this: swing music likes to build anticipation, then release it with a snap of energy. You can see this in the way that the 1 and 3 beats are under-emphasized, and the main hits come on the 2 and 4 beats. So dah-DUM dah-DUM, instead of the DUM-dum DUM-dum you might get in other music. But it’s not like the odd beats are dead! Harmonic instruments come in on the odd beats, which is what makes you anticipate something, but the emptiness of the rhythm section leaves you unsatisfied until they come in. Like a call-and-response, this build up and release of tension is what makes you move.
And if you can catch this pattern of energy, you basically know which are the odd and even beats, which means you now have just 4 options (1, 3, 5, 7) left for guessing the 1 beat!
How do you get a feel for this pattern? Try doing the classic head tilt and finger snap to a bunch of songs. Here’s Duke Ellington teaching how to do it with class:
Instruments
What does it mean for drums to be emphasized anyway? Pay attention to the snare drum.
If you’re like me and you had no idea what a snare drum is, check out this video:
Now let’s hear a song that’s very instrumental:
Notice the snare drums now? Those are happening on even beats.
Chord progressions and cadences
The final piece of the puzzle is chord progressions. The entire theory of chord progressions is beyond what I can capture in this blog post, but the basic idea is that within any given scale, there are notes that you play at the same time to form a chord, and when you play chords in a specific sequence they “feel” a certain way. So for example, when ending a phrase, musicians often play a 2-5-1 chord progression:
The 5-1 chord progression is a great example of a cadence (lit. “a falling”) which gives a sense of finality to a phrase of music.
I don’t have any good tricks for learning chord progressions. But simply knowing that musicians pick and choose from a common set of patterns is helpful, and if you pay attention to these patterns you can tell whether you’re at the end of a phrase or a middle of a phrase. Listen long enough and you start to realize when you’re listening to the 3-and-4, or 7-and-8 in a swing song, and the 1 starts sounding very different from the notes that precede it.
Extensive listening
It’s time to switch to exposure to a large volume of music. Keeping with the idea that extensive listening should be “comprehensible”, here’s a playlist of songs with obvious elements of what we just discussed (music structure, instruments, chord progressions):
And with that, go forth and be as cool as you wish to be.
Notes
- In practice you really want to be able to identify other beats too, so you always know where you are in a song. The 7 and 8 in particular are useful because you get to prep before starting to dance on the 1. For leaders, a nice thing you can do is to prep your followers by doing a stomp off on the and-8 (as you would at the end of a mini dip)—experienced followers sometimes notice your prep-for-the-prep on the 7 and join you in the stomp off; it’s cool.
- I tried searching for sources while writing this blog post, but apparently the idea has mutated in my mind over the years and many conversations. Most people talk about intensive vs extensive reading instead of learning. But my model is a useful and natural extension of the concept.
- Effortlessness is key here because you can go further if you avoid tiring yourself out.
- Disclaimer: I am not an expert on music theory, and I really only understand 32-bar swing. If you wanted to learn about 12-bar blues you’re out of luck.
- This is potentially confusing because she starts her verse on the 7 beat, not the 1.
- Verdi Club in San Francisco.