Anyone close to me will tell l be able to tell you how uncoordinated I am. It’s ironic because I like music so much. Well, late last year, I decided to learn how to dance after a Portuguese friend showed me the basic steps to salsa.

What is salsa?

Aside from being a great condiment, it’s a surprisingly simple dance.

In its simplest form, it’s a dance with steps on counts 1-2-3, 5-6-7. Listen to the video below for an example of the counting. I really like the lyrics.

This is about as far as I got last year. I learned the basic steps, how to move forward and to the side.

There are different kinds of salsa

I felt like dancing today, so I looked up some tutorials on salsa to refresh my memory. It turns out there are two kinds of salsa dancing, called “on-one” and “on-two.” On-one is also called LA style, while on-two is called New York style. The numbers represent when the break steps are taken. Break steps are steps that change direction.

One-one salsa steps out on one and five of the 1-2-3, 5-6-7. On-two steps out on the… yeah. The two. That makes its count more like 2-3-4, 6-7-8. As a beginner dancer, I picked up on-one quickly. Today, learning on-two was much more challenging.

I did find a great one-minute video with a visual comparison of the footwork.

Why this is difficult for me

My struggle with “getting it” had two obstacles. First, I don’t listen to salsa music or anything like it, so it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on musically. There’s so much syncopation that I have a hard time keeping track of the count while also moving at the right times. There are no familiar instruments like a drum set hitting the snare on two and four every measure. The video above does make the conga part very clear though (you can see him playing it).

Second, the vocabulary that dance teachers use is different from what I know from my musical background. For starters, they always count to eight, not four like I’d expect. What are those counts? Are they eighth notes or quarter notes? Do they change with the song?

How I eventually figured it out

Joel Dominguez has a YouTube video explaining two ways to count the New York style. One is with numbers, like I described at the beginning of this article. The other way is to listen to the conga. Understanding that the conga has a specific role to play in salsa music was the thread I needed to pull to unravel this dance’s sweater. Counting to eight’s just too much. Musicians can only count to four.

I found a playlist of salsa music for dance practice and listened to the whole thing, always listening for the conga. The conga usually plays on 1 2 3 4 +. Using what I learned from Joel’s explanation, the break steps should happen on the twos, where the conga slaps.

From there it was just a matter of practicing the steps using what I’d learned. After practicing this for a while, I’ll try dancing with my wife. She’s a much better dancer than me, having studied when she was young. Then the are some other special things to learn, like spins, for example. But I’m in no hurry. I’ve been uncoordinated this long—I can handle another few months or years.