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Salsa Timbale Patterns: The Full Roadmap

Lesson 10 of the lesson series. You now own cáscara, the bells, the abanico and a handful of fills. This lesson is about where each one goes — a section-by-section walk through a typical salsa arrangement, from the intro to the last hit.

The one idea behind the whole roadmap

The timbalero's part in salsa is a volume curve. You start on the shell, you move to the bell, you come back down. Everything else is detail. A player who nails that arc with three patterns will be hired over a player with twenty patterns and no sense of structure. That arc is also why the instrument sounds the way it does in the genre — for the historical background, see timbales in salsa.

Reading the grids

Two-bar grids show eighth notes across two bars of 4/4 (sixteen counts, bar line marked with a pipe). One-bar grids show sixteenth notes. O is a bell mouth stroke, x a bell neck stroke, m/h are macho and hembra strokes, capitals are accented, and z is a buzz roll stroke. Everything is in 2-3 son clave unless noted; flipping to 3-2 means swapping the two bars of each pattern, and if that sentence isn't obvious yet, re-read the clave lesson.

The section map

Intro

Most salsa charts open with either a piano or horn statement. Your default is an abanico to start the band, then whichever pattern matches the density of what follows. If the intro is a full horn shout, you're on the bell from bar one. If it's a piano montuno alone, get on the shells and stay out of the way.

Count:    1 e & a 2 e & a 3 e & a 4 e & a
Macho:    . . . . . . . . . . . . z z z z
Count:    1 e & a 2 e & a 3 e & a 4 e & a
Macho:    M . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Count the band in with clave, not with a stick click. Half the intros that fall apart do so because the timbalero counted the tune in on the wrong side.

Verse (cuerpo)

Cáscara, on the shells, quiet. This is the pattern the instrument is named for and it's covered in full in lesson 5. In 2-3:

Count:    1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & | 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &
Clave:    . . X . X . . . | X . . X . . X .
Cáscara:  . X X . X . X . | X . X X . X . X

Add the left hand only as much as the vocal allows. The standard left-hand support is a muffled stroke or a light hembra tone on the two clave notes of the two-side bar:

Count:    1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & | 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &
Cáscara:  . X X . X . X . | X . X X . X . X
Hembra:   . . h . h . . . | . . . . . . . .

Volume here is the whole job. If the singer has to push to be heard over your shells, you are playing the verse wrong no matter how clean the pattern is.

Pre-chorus / puente

The four or eight bars before the coro exist to raise the temperature. Keep cáscara but open the left hand up: hembra tones on both clave notes each bar, a touch more stick, and a one-bar fill in the last bar. Fill 1 or fill 7 from the fills lesson both work here; save the abanico for the coro itself.

Count:    1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & | 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &
Cáscara:  . X X . X . X . | X . X X . X . X
Hembra:   . . H . H . . . | H . . H . . H .

Montuno / coro

Right hand moves to the mambo bell and stays there. This is the loudest sustained part of your night and the reason bandleaders hire timbaleros. The core figure — every eighth struck, mouth tones on the five clave notes, neck strokes filling the rest — runs across both bars:

Count:    1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & | 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &
Clave:    . . X . X . . . | X . . X . . X .
Bell:     x x O x O x x x | O x x O x x O x

The bell itself carries the clave relationship, so the left hand reinforces the cycle rather than rescuing it. Put hembra tones on the clave notes, in unison with the bell's mouth strokes:

Count:    1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & | 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &
Bell:     x x O x O x x x | O x x O x x O x
Hembra:   . . H . H . . . | H . . H . . H .

Get this two-hand combination fluent and you can play most salsa gigs. Details and alternate bell articulations are in lesson 6.

Mambo / moña

The mambo section is the written horn feature; a moña is the layered, riffing horn line that often follows or sits inside it. Your bell pattern doesn't change. What changes is that you now have written figures to catch. The two Cuban terms worth knowing here are bombo — the and of 2 on the three-side of clave — and ponche, the beat 4 that follows it. An enormous proportion of arranged salsa kicks land on one of those two notes, because that's where clave puts the weight.

Count:    1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & | 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &
Clave:    . . X . X . . . | X . . X . . X .
Bombo:    . . . . . . . . | . . . X . . . .
Ponche:   . . . . . . . . | . . . . . . X .

Playing the kicks

A kick is played as a hembra rimshot, or hembra plus cowbell in unison, without dropping the bell pattern. Here's a typical two-bar moña figure — an anticipation into beat 1, then the bombo and ponche of the three-side:

Count:    1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & | 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &
Bell:     x x O x O x x x | O x x O x x O x
Kicks:    . . . . . . . H | H . . H . . H .

Two rules for kicks. First, play them with the horns, not before — a kick that arrives early is worse than a kick you missed. Second, don't add kicks that aren't written; the arranger left the other bars empty on purpose. How these appear on the page is covered in reading timbale charts, and the big-band version of this job gets a lesson of its own in mambo and big-band patterns.

Solo section

If somebody else is soloing — piano, trumpet, bass — you stay on the bell and follow their arc: back off during their first chorus, come up as they build, and mark their phrase endings with two-note fills rather than full ones. Watch for a soloist who plays across the barline; the worst thing you can do is fill on top of their best idea.

If you're soloing, the rhythm section usually drops to a vamp and you're free over the montuno. That's a whole discipline of its own — see how to solo on timbales.

Ending

Salsa endings come in three flavours and you should know which one you're playing before the tune starts: a hard final hit (everyone stops together on a written figure), a coro fade (the vamp repeats and someone cuts it), or a cha-cha-style ritardando ending. For the hard hit, ride the bell into the last bar and land the figure with a hembra rimshot and a crash if you have one. For the fade, drop back from bell to cáscara for the last eight bars — the retreat is what tells the audience the tune is over, long before the volume actually drops. Slower material such as cha-cha often wants the ritardando; don't decide that on the bandstand.

Practice this

1. Play sixteen bars of cáscara and sixteen bars of mambo bell, alternating, with no fills at all. Just the switch, clean, in tempo, ten times.
2. Add the hembra clave notes to both patterns. Left hand identical in each; only the right hand changes.
3. Now add an abanico in the last bar before each move to the bell, and a two-note fill in the last bar before each move back to cáscara.
4. Practise the bombo and the ponche in isolation over the bell pattern until you can hit either one on request without the bell faltering.
5. Play along with a full salsa recording, all the way through, and consciously name each section as it goes past. Play the map, not the licks.
6. Record yourself playing the whole arc and check one thing only: is the verse actually quieter than the montuno? Most players think it is and it isn't.
7. Repeat the entire routine in 3-2, swapping the bars of every pattern. Half your gigs will be in 3-2.

Previous: Lesson 9 — Essential Timbale Fills · Next: Lesson 11 — Songo Patterns · Back to the full lesson series