A tango DJ who has thousands of tracks on hundreds of CDs doesn’t necessarily have to know or have heard them all. Sure, there are about 100-200 tracks that are commonly played and familiar, and sometimes colleagues or dancers try to find out the title and artist of a particular piece. As a tango DJ, you’re a natural point of contact for this. But what do you do if you don’t know the track or can’t identify it?

As an example, I would like to cite the following piece of music:

This was recorded at the Belgrade Tango Encuentro in 2016. The video was posted as a link in the Yahoo group for tango DJs, with a request to identify the piece of music. I was the first to watch the video and listen to the music. From an auditory perspective, it can be classified as late EDO or post-EDO; the flavor is romantic with a touch of drama. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attribute it to an orchestra, presumably because it doesn’t fit into the usual repertoire at milongas.

This is exactly where the ‘show more’ button would have been helpful. The music information is somewhat hidden in many YouTube videos:

You then get:

Which solves the problem quickly and painlessly.

In more difficult cases (music not specified on YouTube), a very simple trick helps. There’s an application for tablets and smartphones that analyzes and identifies the music. I use the SoundHound app. Such apps weren’t particularly helpful for tango music in the past, but that has changed significantly in recent years. When playing the video above, SoundHound clearly displays the correct title:

 

This is handy if you want to identify a track at a milonga and aren’t currently dancing. You usually have your phone handy, allowing you to identify a song without disturbing the DJ.

Another option requires basic knowledge of Spanish (Castellano), which every tango enthusiast will pick up sooner or later anyway. Simply listen carefully; you can’t miss the clearly sung and repeated word ‘Vuelve’ (‘Come back’) in the chorus. A quick search on a music notebook yields the following titles:

The final identification is achieved here by briefly listening to the second match.

Of course, you can always ask – it doesn’t cost anything, but it can lead to frustration if even a good DJ doesn’t know the song. Those who are truly desperate could even approach the organizers or the dancers. Whether that’s justified is debatable, so I’ll spare you the description of how I found the right email addresses (it took me 30 seconds).

Abrazos,

 

-Richard (DJ Ricardo)