The DJ at Ceroc Reading was asking about tunes we like to dance to. The problem is that: tunes we like are sometimes not easy to dance to. To check the tunes before making a list for him, I thought I’d check that their tempo or beats per minute were in the accepted range for Ceroc.
Question 1: So what is the accepted range? I’d heard that 90 beats per minute was a minimum. Except that I know I like dancing to Fever by Peggy Lee, and Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps by Doris Day. and I know a lot of other Ceroc dances do too. Now on my iTune player there is a column for b.p.m. (beats per minute). Unfortunately when you click the download artwork, you very rarely get a b.p.m., and if you do it can be a arbitrary and wrong. I should explain at this point I have a quite a comprehensive CD collection which took considerable time to transfer to my iPod. Typically I will buy a CD if I like three or four tracks on it. I usually buy from Amazon. The CD will get loaded on to the iPod, and the ticked tracks synced to my iPhone.
So how to find the bpm for the tunes? A quick Google lead me to a number of links for measuring the beats in tunes and the best seems to be : http://www.all8.com/tools/bpm.htm
So to listen to my ‘danceable tracks’. The problem is that Fever by Peggy Lee is 67bpm, and Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps by Doris Day 68bpm. May be the 90 bpm I'd heard was wrong?
So I thought I’d check the range of tempos by googling “Ceroc beats per minute” Seems the lower limit is 100bmp so even worse for Fever, Perhaps? Well I’ve danced to them both quite few times: even as a vey beginner, and enjoyed them more than many other tracks. So pinch of salt for a lower limit for me. The upper limit is variously quoted as around 160 bpm. For an intermediate dancer such as myself, 160 seems good.
Back to iTunes: what you may not know is that you can manually update the info by right clicking on the track and selecting ‘get info’ from the pop up list.
It is then a simple matter to click on the second tab ‘info’ and update the bpm text box.
If you are as ‘ocd’ as me (or more...?) you can update the year from Wikipedia for Peggy Lee
In the process of Googling I came across the following site: notable for a good range of teaching videos, a couple of which are free!
Jive me crazy
The videos you can download comes in avi format, which widows player (by default) turns it nose up at. Worry not, there is a perfectly safe and free avi player at:
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.html
Happy dancing!
Ian
