Dubstep is a genre of EDM (electronic dance music). It originated in the late 1990s in London and was released for the first time 1998. As a development within a lineage of related styles such as 2-step garage, dub, techno, drum and bass, broken beat, jungle, and reggae.
Nowadays dubstep is way heavier. The Main characteristics are the overwhelming bass lines and drum patterns, clipped samples, claps and occasional vocals.
The tempo is nearly always in the range of 138–142 beats per minute, with a clap or snare usually inserted every third beat in a bar.
The year 2009 saw the dubstep sound gaining further worldwide recognition, often through the assimilation of elements of the sound into other genres, in a manner similar to drum and bass before it.
Other related genres like Chillstep or Liquid emerged. Brostep was created in the US and strongly influenced the similar music style of the so-called Trap, a style that is used in HipHop since the ’80 but is almost in every released song now. We will show you examples of Trap, in fact you are going to make an exercise on it.
Coming back to tango and dubstep. We dance tango on this fusion of dubstep and melodic stuff.
Dubstep works for tango because of the speed and the emphasis on 1 & 3. (if you don’t know about that, don’t worry.)
We are not going to teach you to dance on the melodic part, you already know how to do that. We talked about it in the previous class.
We are going to teach you how to dance on the heavy, hard dubstep part.
Hitting the 1 really hard
When we taught this class the first time in August, Max figured out that in order to hit the 1 really hard, it’s easiest to make a pre-step, which we call the “and”. We’re going to drop onto one foot immediately under the body, and then drop hard onto the other leg to hit the 1. In this song, you can hear the and-1. For 2, 3, 4, we’ll just walk.
Accenting the 2
2 Try this dancing solo
3 Now, in couple, we’re going to do the and-1 together. Then the mark is going to stand still on 2 and the revel makes the voleo, then we walk together 3, 4.
We danced on Lindsey Stirling, “Elements “and “Crystallize“. (FYI Lindsey also dances tango, on her own music… The Arena.)
Improvising with these tools
Now we can think about other movements we know who are and-1 and other movements to make the special 2. We created a couple of sequences, but we prefer you make your own.
Another song we dance to all the time at Tangoloft is the remix of Hotel California by Robin Skouteris.
