Monthly Archives: March 2022

Ask music4dance: Should you add a Single Swing Dance category?

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Arne had another great question (paraphrased): I see Single Swing being danced a lot these days.  Should music4dance add another swing category? Is Single Swing a local thing, national, really new? Do people still dance triple-step Swing?

Here is a slightly cleaned-up version of my response:

East Coast Swing (the triple step variety) is a competition dance, so it’s still being danced regularly in ballroom environments. But the Lindy revival of the ’90s seems to have dominated the social swing scene from what I can tell.

In the ballroom community that I learned to dance in during the ’90s, they used the term East Coast Swing to refer to the competition dance, which was definitely a triple-swing. But if one was dancing socially to music too fast to comfortable dance triple swing, you would revert to something they were calling Single Swing or East Coast Single Swing or some variation on that.

I fell down a rabbit hole, trying to see if my recollection had anything to do with current thinking on this. This video shows a “Single Swing” basic that is exactly what I think of as Single Swing. Duet Dance and DanceTime both have descriptions of various kinds of swings. They seem to agree that what I think of as Single Swing could also be reasonably called “The Jitterbug” (which I had thought was just a different name for Lindy Hop). As with any of this stuff, the history is so twisted up that there probably isn’t a correct answer, or if there is, it would require a historian to dig up.

Even without adding a new dance, you should be able to find some good ideas for Single Swings by searching for generic Swing in the tempo range between 140 and 184 MPM. When I first responded to Arne, I had broken that feature, but it’s now up and running again. So you can go to the Advanced Search Page, choose Swing in the dances section, and type in the tempo range you’d like to filter on. 

I am interested in incorporating Single Swing into the music4dance catalog. Should I do this as Jitterbug or Single Swing or by adding single and triple tags to East Coast Swing? I’d love to get others’ thoughts on this so please feel free to send feedback.

Asking to add a new dance style to the catalog is certainly in the top ten questions I’ve been getting. So I’ve been working on streamlining how I manage dance information to make that easier. Most of this work has been under the hood (although the bug mentioned above was one side effect). One of the more visible aspects of this is a small redesign of the Dance Styles page to simplify it a bit and hopefully make it a little more usable.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback, so please share any thoughts and ideas you have about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way that makes sense for you.

New Feature: General Search

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I’ve finally added a feature that should really be a part of any good website. A general search of the entire site is available by typing one or more keywords in the search box in the upper right and clicking search. Try it out, and let me know what you think.

As I continue to improve music4dance, I find myself torn between making things easier for new or casual members of the site and deeper features that may only be used by more dedicated members. I tend to lean towards the latter because they are often the features that I use or the features based on feedback from members who have been using the site a lot. But I would love to get more people involved, which means making the initial experience as seamless as possible.

Search is pretty much the core feature of this site. The idea is, after all, to try to help partner dancers find music that inspires them to dance. I’ve invested a lot in the search engine that lets you search for songs and made a big push to make the core search work better. But in the meantime, I’ve written many blogs posts, some help pages, and added other content to the site that isn’t directly embedded in the song catalog.

So how do you search for any of the other information? And for that matter, if you’re a first-time user of the site, shouldn’t you be able to search the whole site easily without clicking through to a search page from the home page?

Some technical issues made this a bit more challenging than it would appear. Not the least of which is that the blog and help system are actually an entirely different site using a different technology that I have less control over. But after going down a few different paths, I think I’ve got something that I’m happy with. It could still use some work, and a couple of things about it feel a little kludgy. But I feel like it’s a significant improvement, especially for a first-time user. It also enables a full-text search of the core site, which will let me invest more in content that isn’t directly part of the song catalog. I’ve got a bunch of things I’ve been thinking about along those lines that I haven’t implemented because I was worried they’d be buried without a generalized search.

So as I mentioned at the beginning of this post. You should be able to just type a keyword or two into the search control in the header (or under the hamburger menu if you’re on a smaller device), and you’ll be taken to a search results page. That page is a little more complicated than I’d like but hopefully pretty effective.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback, so please share any thoughts and ideas you have about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way that makes sense for you.