Hi @Musa Starseed , You have a lot of stuff curated re: the history of salsa and different aspects of musicality. I'm working through the 30 day transformation right now. As I go through it, one thing lingers in the back of my mind. I know individual instruments that focus on the down beat pretty well. When I play them individually or even 2-3 at a time, I can catch the rhythm pretty fast. However, listening to a real salsa song, there is just an insane amount of variety and different instruments and patterns. My mind just panics and sort of gives up. I'm talking about the problem of finding the one and dancing to the pulse. I feel like without this ability all other patterns and stuff I learn in group and private sessions are just not that useful. Is that the right approach - focus deeply on rhythm and musicality first? People say if you listen to a lot of salsa, your mind kind of internalizes it. I'm just not so sure if it works like that for me. Asking the people in my life for help is like asking fish how to swim - they don't consciously think about swimming, they just do it if you put them in water. I feel like I'm a colour blind person and everyone is describing how to see colours easily, and it's just not clicking for me. Do you have a progression of easy to hard salsa songs that I can work through and build some confidence like a step-by-step ladder so I can train my brain out of this negative feedback loop it's kind of stuck in?

Hi @Musa Starseed , my salsa teacher, who's an amazing dancer worked through some rhythm and finding 1 exercises with me. She says to block out all instruments except the BASS, which she relies on for finding the 1. She says there is a tension and relaxation cycle between the 1 and the 8. But when researching online, I found the bass is very frequently "syncopated", so I'm not sure if that's a good strategy now. She is right that my problem is I'm listening to too many sources of information, and I need to strip it down to something simple. I'm not sure what that looks though. Thanks for any guidance!

The music clip at at 26:45 of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcif91msZcs , is supposed to be 16 bars. I counted 5 times and could only get 14 bars, or 12 bars a few times. Can you confirm it is 16? It would help to annotate the music with on screen with counts? I'm really confused about this.