Thing is, if you'd said that to me about 18 months ago, it might have been the last straw that made me give up. Fortunately, Amir said the opposite, namely that it can be learned.Originally Posted by Lory
True. There are probably some that find it so difficult to hear that they'll never learn. But there are some people who couldn't dance on the beat at the beginning, and subsequently learned. I think Andy McG claims to be one of these - and he's pretty musical IMHO, and still getting better if Britroc was anything to go by.some people can hardly keep time, let alone hear the subtleties of the music, and I doubt it can be taught.
But what this says to me is that it's not something that you either have or don't have, on or off... it's a continuous spectrum of ability, like most things. Sometimes it's so extreme one way or another that it looks either totally absent on the one hand, or totally natural on the other. But I think that masks what's really going on.
In the Amir workshop that got me started, he majored on breaks (I know that's by no means the whole story, but that was the emphasis there). To start with, no one in the class could do anything with the breaks in the track, which he'd chosen for their regularity.
Then he got people to dance, but stop on the break wherever they were in the move. After a couple of goes, almost everyone could do that.
Then he taught some things you can do with what he calls double and triple accents, and a little routine to string them together, hitting the breaks and the accents.
About 60% of the class could do that after a few goes.
Then he got people to try and freestyle those moves, not doing the routine, but trying to hit the breaks without the comfort of a known routine. Hardly anyone (including myself) could do that.
Yet now, I can hit almost every break if I want to, even in music I don't know. I can't necessarily do anything very clever in the break, but I'm getting better, and I'm enjoying it a lot more as a result.
I don't think I'm anything special. But I started off not hearing anything in the music (not consciously, anyway) and wondering why I got funny looks from the ladies I was dancing with when I piled right through the breaks.
And my feeling now is, thank heavens it is learnable, and that some people can teach it
Chris
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