3/4 Shimmy Drill
No matter which version of the ¾ shimmy you are working on learning, this is a drill that should help. If you take classes from me we do a version of this drill every week of intermediate.
Since the hardest part of doing a ¾ shimmy is speeding it up to tempo, the easiest way to work on that is to use a song that slowly gets faster. I have two that I use in class, the first is Fellahin / Karachi / Ayoubby David Macejka. At about 33 seconds in to the song it gets very slow and speeds up for the rest of the song. Step on every beat and make sure you get all three articulations of your shimmy in during 3/4s of the beat with a pause on the last quarter beat. The other song I like to use is Zar Dance (Ayyub 2/4) by Solace. This song starts slow, speeds up then slows back down to speed up again twice. This allows you to regain your ¾ timing if you have lost it while speeding up the movement. At the end of Zar Dance the music is faster than it is at the end of the first song mentioned. Ideally you would work with both of them.
If you prefer a simple beat to follow you can download a click track series like Simple Click Tracks Vol. 1, 50-150 Bpm Subdivided (mp3 Metronome) instead. A click track series has 10 minutes of essentially a metronome sound at various beats per minute. Start with the slowest one and when you are starting to feel comfortable with it, advance to the next track (preferably with a remote so you don’t stop your motion). If you like the click track idea but don’t want to mess with having to manually advance the speed, you can use a program like audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) to splice the various click tracks together making sure you use full measures for each speed so you do the same number of steps on each foot.
Since the hardest part of doing a ¾ shimmy is speeding it up to tempo, the easiest way to work on that is to use a song that slowly gets faster. I have two that I use in class, the first is Fellahin / Karachi / Ayoubby David Macejka. At about 33 seconds in to the song it gets very slow and speeds up for the rest of the song. Step on every beat and make sure you get all three articulations of your shimmy in during 3/4s of the beat with a pause on the last quarter beat. The other song I like to use is Zar Dance (Ayyub 2/4) by Solace. This song starts slow, speeds up then slows back down to speed up again twice. This allows you to regain your ¾ timing if you have lost it while speeding up the movement. At the end of Zar Dance the music is faster than it is at the end of the first song mentioned. Ideally you would work with both of them.
If you prefer a simple beat to follow you can download a click track series like Simple Click Tracks Vol. 1, 50-150 Bpm Subdivided (mp3 Metronome) instead. A click track series has 10 minutes of essentially a metronome sound at various beats per minute. Start with the slowest one and when you are starting to feel comfortable with it, advance to the next track (preferably with a remote so you don’t stop your motion). If you like the click track idea but don’t want to mess with having to manually advance the speed, you can use a program like audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) to splice the various click tracks together making sure you use full measures for each speed so you do the same number of steps on each foot.
