Posted: Sun Apr 04, 2004 7:24 pm
Ron -- thanks. I've used ASD a few times for our troupe practices so far, and once for teaching a beginner class, and I've got to say it does a great job. As an alternative to having a pitch control knob on a ghetto blaster it's a far higher quality output, with more accurate control.
Given that I mostly DJ in these situations with my laptop anyway, what it allows is a fairly seamless means of 'getting a feel' for the melody and rhythm of a song without needing to be able to dance to it at full tempo from the start. In one exercise our performance troupe was attempting to 'brainstorm' ideas for choregraphy on specific sections of a song. At full tempo (I guess around 210 bpm) it was quite difficult to come up with well formed ideas, but when I took the tempo back down to around 180 we found we could keep the ideas flowing without needing to stop and restart the music so much.
Given that I mostly DJ in these situations with my laptop anyway, what it allows is a fairly seamless means of 'getting a feel' for the melody and rhythm of a song without needing to be able to dance to it at full tempo from the start. In one exercise our performance troupe was attempting to 'brainstorm' ideas for choregraphy on specific sections of a song. At full tempo (I guess around 210 bpm) it was quite difficult to come up with well formed ideas, but when I took the tempo back down to around 180 we found we could keep the ideas flowing without needing to stop and restart the music so much.