Salsa by Kortiva®musicality made easy
Most salsa apps teach you moves. This one teaches you the count underneath them.
Most dancers are off the beat and never find out. Train the ear that hears the 1, the 2, and the clave — then put your feet on it.
Why timing comes first
Most courses save musicality for intermediate levels. This one opens with it.
You move on counts. When the band drops out you can’t hear it — you can only count it. The pattern you learn first is the one you’ll default to under pressure, so if the timing goes in last, it goes in wrong. Unlearning that is the single most expensive thing a dancer can do.
So the chapters go hearing, naming, moving — in that order. Shines and patterns live in the move library, next to the counts they land on. Open those after the ear knows what it’s doing.
What it looks like
Screens from the current build. These are the light theme — the app defaults to auto, so if your phone is on dark you’ll see dark.
The instructor who reads your taps
Rosa shows up on every screen. She reads what you just played and tells you one thing to change. Not a dashboard, not a list — one note, the one that moves the needle next.
Early on she’ll point at the pulse. A few sessions in she’ll start naming counts. If a chapter is giving you trouble she’ll say so and point you back to the drill that fixes it. She never has more than one thing to say at a time.
Games
The part most likely to make you open the app twice. Each one trains a different part of hearing or holding the count.
Hold the Count
The music drops out and comes back. Are you still on it?
Name That Sound
The band plays, one instrument stops. Which one?
Count Me In
Later rounds check every other bar, then every fourth.
Catch the Count
All eight counts fall. Catch the ones that are yours.
Follow the Leader
Rosa plays a figure. Play it back. Nothing shows you what it was.
Call the Change
Tap when the phrase turns — before it turns.
The Gauntlet
One song, the target keeps moving.
A lane game built on the On2 step. The legend sits next to the lanes while you play, so by the time you survive the higher tempos you’ve internalised the basic without having to think it.
A course, in order
The course runs from hearing the clave to moving on the count — hearing before counting, counting before moving. A fair stretch of the path lives before the first step, and that’s on purpose.
Hear the beat
The pulse under the music — before the count has a number.
Hear the clave
The rhythm that tells you the music is salsa, not something else.
Count on it
Put a 1, a 2, a 5, a 6 on what you hear. Name the beat.
Move on the count
Feet land on the number. Steps follow counts, not the other way around.
Drills, one thing at a time
Each drill works one thing. Both On1 and On2 are covered — most apps pick one. Tap along and the app snaps your tap to the nearest beat, then tells you how far off you landed in milliseconds. A drill is 32 bars, which is about a minute depending on tempo.
Feedback that names the number
Every tap is scored by how far off it landed, in milliseconds. Not “roughly right” — “60ms late on the 2.” The app also reports which count your tap landed nearest, so a tap on time for the wrong beat reads differently from one late for the right beat.
| Within | Verdict |
|---|---|
| ±40 ms | perfect |
| ±90 ms | good |
| beyond, before the beat | early |
| beyond, after the beat | late |
| half a beat or more | miss |
A calibration screen measures your device’s audio latency on first run, so what the app calls “on time” is actually on time on your phone.
Listen — build the groove yourself
Not a click track. Add instruments one at a time, mix them to taste, then drill against what you built. Clave, conga, cowbell, timbales, guiro, and more — each with its own on/off toggle and volume slider.
More voices as the app grows.
- Just the clave1 voice
- Clave and conga2 voices
- The whole bandeverything at once
Or build your own from scratch and hit Save this groove — it’s waiting the next time you open the app.
Set the tempo, work at the speed you can hold, then take the groove you built into a drill.
A move library with the counts
Patterns, turns, and shines — what happens, on which count, on which foot. Each finished entry has an animated dancer you can slow to a quarter speed and view from fixed angles (front, side, back, other side), with a frame-by-frame flipbook alongside if you’d rather read stills.
The library is shipping ahead of the final art. The finished entries have animation; the rest are placeholders and the app says so on the entry itself. If you came for the move library specifically, that’s where it is.
A warm-up you’ll actually do
A short head-to-ankle flow in the order a dance class does them. Each movement is time-based rather than rep-based; you hold a stretch, you don’t count it. Same flow every time. It takes as long as it takes.
Nothing to sign up for
No account. No feed. No leaderboards. Nobody to compare yourself against.
Your practice stays on your phone.
Your practice records stay on your device. The app connects to Expo only to check for updates. No ads, no leaderboards.