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Songo Timbale Patterns: The Modern Cuban Style

Lesson 11 of the lesson series. Songo is what happened when Cuban percussionists spent the 1970s listening to funk records and decided the clave could survive the encounter. It's looser than salsa, it leans on the backbeat, and it's the doorway between timbales and the drum set.

Where songo came from

The style is inseparable from Los Van Van, the Havana band founded in 1969 by bassist and arranger Juan Formell. Formell rebuilt the traditional charanga line-up — violins and flute — around electric bass, keyboards and, later, trombones, and the rhythm section had to invent a groove that could carry it. José Luis Quintana, universally known as Changuito, is the percussionist most credited with codifying what came out of that: songo.

What made it new was the setup as much as the rhythm. Rather than a timbalero on timbales and a conguero on congas, Changuito built a hybrid station — timbales, congas, bass drum, jam block, cymbals — and played parts that a whole percussion section would previously have divided between them. Songo also opened the door to timba, the harder, denser Cuban dance style of the 1990s. If you want the wider context of the players involved, the famous timbaleros page covers the lineage.

What actually makes it songo

Three things separate a songo groove from a salsa groove played sloppily:

Grid conventions on this page: two-bar grids are eighth notes across two bars of 4/4 (pipe marks the bar line); one-bar grids are sixteenth notes. X is a plain hit, O a bell mouth stroke, x a neck or hi-hat stroke, m/h macho and hembra, capitals accented.

Pattern 1: basic songo on timbales

Cáscara in the right hand, exactly as you already know it, with accented hembra tones on beats 2 and 4. That's the whole thing, and it already sounds like songo.

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
Hembra:   . . H . . . H . | . . H . . . H .

Notice the collision: the cáscara and the hembra both hit beat 2 and beat 4 in the first bar, so those are unison strokes. In the second bar the hembra backbeats fall where cáscara has notes on 2 but not on 4 — the hembra is on its own there, which is exactly the moment the pattern stops sounding like plain cáscara and starts sounding like songo.

Play the hembra tones open and let them ring. Muffling them turns the groove back into salsa.

Pattern 2: jam block, hi-hat and ghost notes

This is the pattern most people picture when they say songo: a jam block or woodblock carrying the clave notes, a hi-hat on the offbeat eighths, backbeats on the hembra, and ghosted macho sixteenths filling the gaps. One bar of sixteenths, repeating:

Count:    1 e & a 2 e & a 3 e & a 4 e & a
Jam blk:  X . . . . . X . . . . . X . . .
Hi-hat:   . . x . . . x . . . x . . . x .
Hembra:   . . . . H . . . . . . . H . . .
Macho:    . . . . . . . m . . . . . . . m

The jam block line is the three-side of son clave — beat 1, the and of 2, beat 4 — so in a 2-3 tune this bar is the second of the two-bar cycle. In the first bar the jam block plays only beats 2 and 3. A jam block gives you a dry, high crack that survives an electric band far better than a woodblock; our jam block guide covers the sizes and mounting. It goes on the same rail as your bells, which the accessories guide and cowbell mounting guide both address.

The hi-hat here is played with a foot pedal on the offbeats. If you don't own one, play those strokes on a closed cymbal or leave them out — the pattern survives, it just loses some of its shuffle.

Pattern 3: the kit-hybrid songo

Add a bass drum and move the right hand to the bell and you have the setup Changuito made standard, and effectively a drum-set part played on Latin instruments:

Count:    1 e & a 2 e & a 3 e & a 4 e & a
Bell:     O . x . x . x . O . x . x . x .
Hembra:   . . . . H . . . . . . . H . . .
Bass dr:  X . . . . . X . . . . . X . . .

The bass drum is playing the three-side of clave — 1, the and of 2 (the bombo) and beat 4 (the ponche) — which is also, not coincidentally, close to what the bass player is doing in a tumbao. That doubling is deliberate: in songo the kick and the bass lock in a way they never do in traditional salsa, and it's where the funk influence is most audible.

The bridge to the drum set

Once you can play pattern 3, you've essentially been playing a drum set with an unusual choice of drums. The right hand rides, the left hand plays a backbeat, the foot plays a kick, and the second foot plays a hi-hat. That is a rock or funk kit part with the ride replaced by a bell and the snare replaced by a hembra.

This is why songo is the natural crossover lesson for kit players and why so many drummers learn it before they learn cáscara — it feels familiar. It also runs in the other direction: a timbalero who owns songo can sit behind a kit and produce something credible in an afternoon. The mechanics of that move, plus mounting timbales on a kit rail, are in lesson 13.

Two warnings for kit players arriving here. First, the backbeat in songo is not the anchor the way it is in rock — it's an accent inside a clave-based pattern, and if you start leaning on it as the reference point, the whole thing tilts. Second, resist the urge to bring your fills. A four-bar rock fill sounds absurd here; use the vocabulary from lesson 9 instead. For where songo fits among the other Cuban rhythms and the instruments that play them, the Latin percussion guide and congas primer are worth an hour.

Practice this

  1. Play cáscara in 2-3 for two minutes, no left hand, at 95 BPM. Boring, mandatory.
  2. Add hembra accents on 2 and 4 only. Get comfortable with the unison strokes in bar one and the solo hembra note on beat 4 of bar two.
  3. Take pattern 2 apart: play the jam block line alone against a clave loop until you can hear that it is clave. Then add hi-hat, then hembra, then ghost notes — one layer per minute, never two at once.
  4. Practise the ghost notes at half your intended volume, then quarter. If a listener across the room can pick them out individually, they're too loud.
  5. Add the bass drum from pattern 3 last, and play it alone with the bell before combining all four limbs.
  6. Run all three patterns back to back, eight bars each, without stopping. Then do it again in 3-2 with the bars swapped.
  7. Put on a Los Van Van track and play along for its full length. Songo is a feel before it's a pattern, and no grid on this page will teach you that part.

Previous: Lesson 10 — Salsa Timbale Patterns · Next: Lesson 12 — Mambo & Big-Band Patterns · Back to the full lesson series