Help me find a decent recorded version of the Ox Dance

March 9, 2013 6:01 PM

The Ox Dance is a traditional Swedish mock-fighting dance. (Here's a video of my Dad doing the dance with a Norwegian folk dancer in Oslo.) I'm planning on dancing it with my dad at my wedding in a week. I tried to talk the band into playing the music for it (it's a pretty simple melody and I even found sheet music for it (apparently it shows up a lot in beginner's piano books)), but it's a little out of their oeuvre, and I guess we're not paying them enough to learn new music, so they declined. So I figured I'd find a recorded copy. Considering the fact that it's all over YouTube, I thought it would be a piece of cake. But I can't seem to find a good recorded version of it anywhere. Help me out?
posted by ErWenn to Media & Arts (4 answers total)

Oooooh my gosh, that is the cutest video ever (and your Dad is the cutest ever, too).

That's pretty silly that your band wouldn't be willing to play something for that - I guess it is a little late to find a new band (which is what I'd do - Mr. Arnicae, a professional musician, peered over my shoulder and said "Why wouldn't they play THAT? It would take them 30 seconds for it...and they had sheet music? Maybe they're too embarrassed to admit they can't read sheet music").

One option would be to get a piano-playing friend to record a rendition of it on a smart phone - that has worked decently for me in the past when people need an accompaniment track.
posted by arnicae at 7:20 PM on March 9, 2013

if you have a youtube video with a decent recording, you can just use this handy site snipmp3.com to convert the audio to an mp3.
posted by ruhroh at 9:26 PM on March 9, 2013

Response by poster: arnicae: My dad plays piano, so I may ask him to record a version if I can't find anything better. But I feel like a professionally recorded version would be better. In any case, I don't blame the band that much. A wedding band earns a large portion of their exposure by impressing the guests at their performances. If they play something that comes across as shoddy, then that reflects poorly upon them. The rest of our guests aren't going to know that they've never seen the piece before. Besides, we've already asked them to play a song they've never played before for our wedding dance, and they readily agreed to that.

That's a good idea, ruhroh, but unfortunately, none of the videos I've found have decent audio (they're almost all live performances filmed on cell phone cams).
posted by ErWenn at 9:38 AM on March 10, 2013

Response by poster: I ended up finding a halfway decent version of the music on YouTube. Couldn't make snipmp3 work, but I have the UnPlug Firefox plug-in, so I used that to download the .flv file and then ripped out the audio with the program AudioExtractor.

The dance went fantastically! I might post a video when we get it back from the videographer.
posted by ErWenn at 8:21 PM on March 17, 2013