Why Start from the Song?
Most instructors plan classes starting from dances they already know and then find music to fit them. That works, but it means you always default to your most familiar repertoire and can miss dances you haven't discovered yet.
Starting from the song reverses the process. You hear something on the radio, a client requests a specific track, or you want to build a themed night around a particular artist or era. The music is the constraint; the dance question is "what fits this?"
BootStepper is built to support both directions. The song-to-floor workflow uses the Songs page as the starting point and follows the connections from there.
Step 1: Find the Song on BootStepper
Go to Songs and search by title or artist. If you know the approximate BPM, set a tempo filter to narrow down the results before scrolling. The song detail page shows the track's audio characteristics—tempo, key, energy, danceability, valence— alongside any matched dances in the BootStepper database.
If the song isn't in BootStepper yet, you can add it. Once it's in the system, you can start connecting dances to it as they're choreographed or as you find them.
Step 2: Browse the Matching Dances
The song's detail page lists every line dance choreographed to that track. Each entry shows the dance name, choreographer, difficulty level, count, and wall count. This gives you a quick comparison view before you commit to clicking through to individual dances.
A popular song will often have multiple dances—sometimes a dozen or more. This is useful: it means you can choose between a beginner version and an improver version of the same song, or pick whichever choreographer's style fits your class best.
A newer or more obscure song may have only one dance, or none at all. If there are no dances yet, the song page is still useful as a reference point for when new choreography is released.
Step 3: Assess Each Dance
Click through to the dance pages that look most promising. The dance detail page shows the full metadata: difficulty, counts, walls, restarts, step notes, and linked videos.
If you're choosing between multiple dances on the same song, compare a few dimensions:
- Difficulty and count. Is this in the right range for your class? An improver dance with 64 counts and two restarts is a different proposition from a beginner dance with 32 counts and no restarts, even if they both use the same song.
- Walls. Does the room layout suit the wall count? Four-wall dances need a room where dancers can comfortably face all four directions. A two-wall dance might work better in a narrow space.
- Choreographer. If your class already knows and likes dances by a particular choreographer, picking their version of a song lowers the learning curve. Dancers who recognise a choreographer's style adapt faster.
- Videos. Watch before you commit. Written step notes describe the choreography but don't convey the feel of the dance the same way a video does. BootStepper links to available video demonstrations directly on the dance page.
Step 4: Save and Build
Once you've found the right dance, save it. If you're still in research mode—assembling candidates before making a final class plan—use the heart icon to add it to your Favorites. If you're actively building a class set, add it directly to the collection you're working in.
Repeat the process for each song you're planning around. After a session of research, your collection holds the curated set with the songs and dances you've chosen, in the order you want to teach them.
Step 5: Prepare Notes and Cues
Before the class, add per-entry notes to the collection. These are the notes you'd otherwise scribble on a piece of paper or keep in your head: the step at bar 3 that always trips beginners, the restart that catches people off guard, the BPM you should cue at, the musical phrase that signals the wall change. Having these in the collection means they travel with the dance, not with a particular session's notes file.
Step 6: Teach and Track Live
On the class or social night, open the collection and switch it to a live session. Mark each dance as playing as you progress through the set. Dancers can follow along on their phones—they'll see the current dance, the next entry, and any cues or notes you've made public.
If you've linked the collection to a Discord channel, the BootStepper bot will post now-playing updates automatically as you advance through the session. Dancers who miss the announcement in the room can catch it on their phone in the channel.
Requests that come in during the session—either through the collection's request queue or via the Discord bot's /request command—appear in the queue for you to accept or decline. You stay in control of what goes on the floor.
After the Night: Review and Update
After the class, the collection is a record of what you taught, in what order, on that date. If a dance didn't land—too fast, too many restarts, wrong energy—note it before you close the collection so you remember next time. If a song was a hit and the floor loved it, note that too.
Move dances from your Learning collection to Taught once they've been through a class. Over time, the pattern of what works with your specific audience becomes clear from the collection history, not just from memory.