Published on August 18, 2024 2:10 PM GMT
One of the things I like about playing for contra dances is that youhave a lot of freedom about what toplay. As long as you meet the minimum requirements for danceablemusic (108-122bpm, contraphrasing) you can do almost anything. And then if you're abottomleft corner band you might want to play some pop covers.
While lots of pop music has a tempo in the right range, it's much lesscommon for it to have the right phrasing. Without dancers who willbe messed up if you shorten a section or add a few beats, popcomposers have no reason to write songs with this structure. But manysongs come pretty close! So the first part of preparing a pop coveris picking a song that won't be too much work.
The easiest songs to adjust are ones where there are two 16 beat (8s)melodies you can pull out and treat as the A and B. For example,here's the HampsterDance:
I think the A part should pretty clearly be the iconic chipmunkifiedWhistle Stop (Robin Hood) melody: (mp3).
There are a few choices for the B, but I think the best option is thesynth lead: (mp3).
Both of these are 16 beats, so playing AABB gets you once through thedance.
Let's try a harder one. Here's Walk the Moon'sShutUp and Dance:
The song has a reasonably phrased 32 beat verse: (mp3).
And a reasonably phrased 32 beat chorus: (mp3).
But if you jam them together they don't feel great. The song handlesthis with a 16 beat prechorus: (mp3).
This does not come out to a good length: 32 + 16 + 32 is not amultiple of 64. One way to fix this is to only play thesecond half of the verse (A1) then the prechorus (A2) then the chorus(B1 and B2). This is ok, but it feels a bit rushed, especially withthe transition from the end of the chorus back into the verse. I dothink this would work, but can we do better?
Later in the recording they play a 32 beat version of thepre-chorus: (mp3).
If we use that we now have 32 + 32 + 32, one and a half times throughthe dance. We want to end with the chorus, and all our existing partsflow well into each other, so we should probably stick something atthe beginning. The remaining recognizable bit of the song is theintro, played first for 8 beats and then later for 16: (mp3).
Playing it for 32 beats seems like it would be a little long, but Ithink it can work. One way to handle it is to start pretty spare andthen bring in additional instrumentation every 8 beats, with specialattention to marking the beginning of the A2. So we have:
- A: (32) Intro (2x) B: (32) Verse A: (32) Long prechorus B: (32) Chorus
Once you have the structure, it's a matter of identifying the mosticonic aspects of the song that are a good fit for yourinstrumentation, but as long as the structure supports the dance, thebeat is clear, and people can tell what song you're doing you are 90%of the way there.
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