SwingDJs

Hello everyone.

I'm not an experienced DJ and I was hoping for some help.

I'm promoting a new venue that will be a mix of WCS, Lindy Hop, and Salsa. I'd love to get some feedback regarding the logistics of playing music for this type of event. I was thinking of rotating each style of music in 10 minute segments. The 2-3 songs in each segment would differ in speed and genre. Any suggestions would be helpful.

Thanks in advance!

Good freaking luck that's all I've got to say. Purists from every camp will drive you insane. Odds are you'll have a watered down playlist of songs from each genre, after you figure in requests.

So, let's say I'm a so-called Westie Hopper. The suggested mix above means that I maybe get to dance 2/3 of the night. That assumes I will dance to anything in the Lindy/WCS genre. If I only dance in a tight tempo range, then I get even less for my money. And that doesn't even address the salsa battle of classic or club music.

Kalman

Is this something that you're doing on a weekly/monthly basis? If you have a strong scene in all of those dances, I think it might make a good 2-3 times per year venue, but I think it would be tough to keep it going more regularly. I think the main ingredient in this would be to have a seasoned DJ who knows music from all 3 genres. An inexperienced DJ could really kill it.

That said, mixing by sets of 2 or 3 sounds like a good idea as long as the songs aren't too long. 10 minutes is quite a while to wait to dance, so you may want to err on the shorter side.

Best of luck!

Portland has a pretty successful one that's once a month. It's a tango, blues & swing dance, with lessons in all of the dances beforehand. They organize it in a tandas format (a tango term, basically a set of 3 songs. In tango, when you ask someone to dance, you're expected to dance the entire tanda with them). So they have a tanda of tango, a tanda of blues and a tanda of swing. Repeat.

I think that one of the reasons that this dance is successful is that there is a lot of crossover in interest between blues/tango/swing. A lot of swing dancers have been exposed to blues and from blues some dancers get to eyeing tango ...

I went to the one last month and had an absolutely fabulous time.

With lindy, salsa, westie, I see less of an area of overlap. But that's my two cents.

Good luck.

Thanks for the advice!

It will certainly be a challenge. The group will be roughly one thrid intermediate dancers and two thirds beginners. They already have a community because they go to the same church...for the most part. I think the social aspects of the community will be as important as the dancing and this will lessen the potentially negative impact of such diverse dance styles. There is much less crossover between WCS/Lindy/Salsa as compared to Lindy/Blues/Tango.

We plan on having beginner lessons before the dances and one "intensive" workshop per month on a Saturday afternoon. Regarding the lessons, we will feature a different dance style each month.

Thanks again!