Quote:
Originally Posted by El Salsero Gringo  No, to the first, yes to the second.
In WCS your triple must be on 3 & 4, or 1 & 2, (or 5 & 6 or 7 & 8 if you're counting up to 8 across 2 bars) |
Can't find the link now, but I'm sure I've seen 1 2 & 3 4 5 & 6 (or possibly 1 2 & 3 4 & 5 6) as an alternative timing for straight eighths music. And of course if the count starts on beat 3, then you'd have 3 4 & 1 2 ... so the "triple" falls in the same place as Cha Cha.
In a ballroom cha cha your triple step is 4 & 1. (or 4 & 5 and 8 & 1 if you count to 8 across two bars). (N.B. I'm saying a triple
can fall on 4 & 1 without it being a gross error,
not that there's a mode of WCS dancing where tripling on 4 & 1 is the norm).
Quote:
Straight triplets: think one-and-two, three-and-four
Swung triplets: think one a-two, three a-four
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Basically this is correct, but I think you either mean "triple steps" (talking about the dancing) or "eighths" (talking about the music). Triplets have a specific musical meaning and at least to me, the mere mention of them strongly implies the music is "swung".
I don't know if this will help anyone, but here's my understanding of how this all works in terms of the music, and what "eighths", "triplets" and "swung eighths" actually mean. It's probably old hat to most of you, but I was confused for
ages about what "eighths" meant, here's a bit of explanation as I understand it:
Firstly, an eighth is
not an eighth of a beat, as I naively thought for many years
. It's an eighth of a
bar, and as a bar has four beats, it's actually
half a beat.
So with straight eighths, we're dividing each beat up into two, and so we have:
Eighths: 1---2---3---4---5---6---7---8---1
Beats:.. 1---&---2-------3---&---4-------1
Now a lot of jazz actually divides each beat up into three, or
triplets (so there are 12 triplets in a bar), but the notes only fall on the 1st and 3rd triplets of each note:
Triplets: 1--2--3--4--5--6--7--8--9-10-11-12--1
Beats:... 1-----&--2--------3-----&--4--------1
Now the way you write music with triplets turns out to be a pain in the neck, so the musicians started saying, "let's write the music
as if it were with eighths, but we'll know you have to play the "middle" eighths with the same timing as the 3rd triplet in each note. They often called this playing
with a triplet feel. So now we have:
Triplets:................... 1--2--3--4--5--6--7--8--9-10-11-12--1
Eighths with a triplet feel: 1-----2--3-----4--5-----6--7-----8--1
Beats:...................... 1-----&--2--------3-----&--4--------1
Now the
other way of looking at this is to say we're still playing eighths, it's just that the 'half notes' are shifted, or
swung from the halfway point to lie closer to the end note. What's particularly interesting about this is we can now talk about the
amount of swing. The "usual" amount of swing recreates that triplet count and so moves the & beat so it lies 2/3 of the way along. But you can have "lightly swung" music where the & beat is just delayed a little bit, or "hard swung" music where the & note lies even closer to the end (though in practice the & beat rarely ends up past about the 3/4 point). Straight eighths music, of course, is not swung at all - the & beats fall exactly half way between the full beats.
(Waits for someone with actual musical knowledge to correct this...)