Evan Carmichael breaks down four Latin and Caribbean dances by their beat count and sound. Merengue has a simple 2-beat rhythm, bachata features twangy guitar with singers calling their own names, salsa uses an 8-beat clave with trumpets, and kizomba is defined by a heavy off-beat bass line.
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Okay, so a bit of a fun video today. I got a question from one of my YouTube viewers, Mohammed, who wrote in on the video that I had about learning rap music. And he wrote in to say, "Evan, I want you to show me the difference between salsa, merengue, bachata, and kizomba." So Mohammed, this is for you. We're going to go through the differences and how to identify the music and then also do a quick demo of what the dance looks like. This is Nina. First one is merengue. And merengue you can identify because it is like dance music. It's only got 2 beats, so it's boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And as you're stepping it, this is all you have to do to dance merengue. You're just stepping on the spot. And so you can hear the beats pretty clearly. I'm going to put on an example. So as you can hear in this song, it's beat, beat, beat, beat, beat. That's merengue, okay? And you're just stepping each time. And if you can walk, you can merengue. All the moves end up just happening with the arms, but all you have to worry about is stepping like this. So if you hear it kind of sounds like just dance music, that's merengue. So do a quick demo of what that looks like. Meringue, pretty simple. Next up, we'll do bachata. So with bachata, it's a 4-beat dance. So merengue is 2-beat and you're stepping every beat. Bachata is a 4-beat dance, and the way to identify it is it's got a lot of twanginess to it. It's got this electric guitar— is it electric guitar? It's got a guitar, like a twangy guitar sounding song. It's Dominican Republic, has the origins from Dominican Republic, and so we'll put on a song. So listen for the guitar twanginess. If that comes on, you know it's bachata. You hear the guitar? Twangy guitar? You know it's bachata. We'll get a demo. French, German, Portuguese, Italian. The other thing in bachata, the singers always like to say their names. So the artist, so you have Prince Royce, who's a famous bachata song, and every Prince Royce song he's going to say Royce somewhere in there. It's a thing in bachata for some reason, they always have to say their names in all the songs at some point. So if you hear them calling out their own name, you know it's bachata. So we're making our way up. Next one is salsa. Salsa is more complicated, it's an 8-beat dance. There's a whole bunch of different origins and roots to it. How to tell the difference? The main instrument is a clave. It's a percussion instrument that you can sometimes hear in a lot of the songs. It's ba ba ba ba ba. But a good way to identify it is simply through the horns. If you hear a lot of trumpets blasting, you know that's a salsa song versus something else, versus the guitar that you're going to find in bachata, or versus like the dancing music you're going to get in Merengue. A lot of the traditional salsa stuff is also pretty upbeat, uptempo, makes you feel happy. So we're going to put on an example. So here are the trumpets. Upbeat. We'll show you what it looks like. Salsa! So the last one we're going to cover is kizomba. Now in the video, the person said kizombo. It's actually kizomba, and this is an African dance, and it's the weakest of the 4 that we're going to demo in terms of what I know. My skill set is pretty limited on kizomba. But the biggest trademark, how to identify a kizomba song is typically a really heavy bass. So you have this bass that just keeps kicking in. I'm going to find an example for you. We're going to play Nina's favorite kizomba song. Well, it's your favorite. I like it too. It's a good song. So listen for the bass, okay? Listen to it. Not yet, not yet. Here we go. Hear that heavy bass and a little bit off time? That's kizomba. Here's how we dance it. Kizomba! So that's it, quick intro to— what do we do? Merengue, bachata, salsa, kizomba, Let me know what you guys think. If you have questions, leave it below. You want me to demo something else? Let me know, maybe we'll make another video for you. And if you want to see more videos like this, subscribe to the channel in the corner, click on my face. Thanks guys, and we'll see you soon.
