Re: [Callers] Calling Without A Band

Hi, I live in the far reaches of Kent, England, ninety minutes away from the nearest contra monthly dance and 2 or 3 hours from the nearest contra dance band. My wife and I love contra dancing - we spend most of our holidays in the USA! So we have started our own club and are teaching beginners from scratch - people who have never done a folk dance in their life. We run our club every Monday evening in a village hall, and teach a 90-minute class every Tuesday in the local leisure centre. We also run dances for people who want a barn dance but can't afford a band. So we have to use recorded music. Fortunately there are some great recordings out there. CDs by English bands like the English Contra Dance Band and Skylark have already been mentioned. Vertical Expression and Fiddlin' Around have also made CDs. All with lots of danceable tracks of suitable length. And of course there are hundreds of CDs by great American bands. Our favourite at the moment is the new Wild Asparagus double CD "Live at the Guiding Star Grange". Our dancers especially like "On the Danforth" (106bpm and builds beautifully). Two great resources: cdbaby: http://www.cdbaby.com and select Genre, Folk, Contra Dance to get to http://www.cdbaby.com/Style/846 You can listen to many of the tracks and then, depending on the album, you may be able to choose between buying the CD, downloading the CD, or downloading selected tracks. I checked quality with them and got the response "All of the mp3s that we sell are encoded at 200 kbps variable bit rate and are D.R.M. Free :-)". And Contracopia: http://www.contracopia.net/ Lots of great bands and great CDs. As has already been mentioned, you do need to check each track. I use Cool Edit to ensure that every track has an intro, and provides sets of 8x8 beats (also known as 32 bars, but I am a dancer, not a musician!). I use a spreadsheet to record: Length of intro, speed in bpm, number of 8x8s, length of track, plus notes on quality, feel, challenges, etc. I can then quickly select a track when I need to meet the changing dynamics of an evening's dancing. We have had great success with recorded music and couldn't function without it. Thanks to all you wonderful musicians who have made these CDs for us. Although I am computer-literate and have my mp3 player with me for backup, I prefer to work with CDs. I recently bought a Numark NDX200 CD Deck to allow me good control - I can cue it up to start where I want, see the remaining time easily, restart a track easily and alter the speed if the dancers are having problems. Yes, of course we would rather have fantastic live music every night. And we do indeed get one of the great contra bands to come down here once a month for our big Saturday night dance. But recorded music also allows us to experiment - we have been using some great swing, pop, eCeilidh and tango tracks for dancing and the dancers love it. It is extra work for me, as finding suitable instrumentals and editing them into 8x8s is not easy. But it is very rewarding, and gives an experience which you can't actually achieve with a single live band. We will continue to spread the joy both ways :-) Happy dancing, John John Sweeney, Dancer, England info(a)contrafusion.co.uk 01233 625 362 http://www.contrafusion.co.uk for Contra Dancing in Kent