Hello everyone! Hope you are having an amazing 2018! This year I decided to create an Arabic rhythms tutorial, where I will teach you the most common rhythms used for belly dancing.
Most Arabic music is marked by a rhythm and as dancers it is important to know them so that we interpret each one accordingly. Knowing them will also help you dance on beat and anticipate the music.
Before we begin, I want to explain a few concepts that I will be using throughout the tutorial.
First of all, lets define "rhythm". A rhythm is a systematic arrangement of musical sounds or, in other words, a repeated pattern of sounds. In Arabic music, rhythms are played by percussion instruments and consist of a specific combination of DUMs and TACs. DUM and TAC represent the sounds made by these instruments.
Each rhythms is going to be played at a certain tempo, which is the speed or pace of music. Differences in tempo can lead you to think the rhythm has changed, but keep in mind that the exact same rhythm can be played slower or faster.
In this tutorial, I will also be speaking about a bar or measure. These are used to separate music in parts of equal duration and this duration will be indicated by a time signature.
Time signatures consist of two numbers written like a fraction (for example 3/4). The top number (in this example, 3) indicates how many beats are in each measure/bar. The bottom number (in this example, 4) specifies which note value is equal to one beat. This helps us count music, which is very important as dancers and instructors. Following our example, a time signature of 3/4 would make us count three quarter-notes per bar, giving us a waltz feel: 1,2,3, 1,2,3, 1,2,3.
As you start to learn the rhythms and apply these concepts, they will all make sense to you and you can always come back to this page to refresh any of them. Below, I will leave the first video of this tutorial where I explain these definitions, so that you can have a better understanding and listen to some of my awesome singing (you'll really see I'm just kidding!).
Thank you for reading and keep moving towards your dreams!