Coypu's named rhythms are not decorative presets. Nearly all of them are timelines taken from living traditions, and most are related to each other. This page covers where each one comes from, how it is built, and what to do with it.
1. What a timeline is
Most of these rhythms are timelines, and the idea has no close European equivalent. A timeline is a short, uneven pattern, usually struck on a bell or a pair of sticks, that repeats without variation for the whole length of a piece. Everyone else in the ensemble orients to it: drummers, dancers, singers.
It is not a rhythm section keeping time in the Western sense, because it does not mark the beat evenly. Think of it instead as a shared coordinate system. The unevenness does the work. Because no two positions in the cycle sound alike, a player always knows where they are. An even pattern could not tell you that.
So a timeline never develops, never fills and never drops out. In Coypu it is the part you set once and leave alone while everything else moves around it.
1.1 Reading a grouping
Each rhythm below is given with its grouping, the gaps between successive strokes as they wrap round the cycle. Tresillo is 3+3+2: a stroke, three steps to the next, three more to the next, then two back to the start.
The grouping tells you much more than the step count does. Two patterns of the same length with different groupings are different rhythms. Two with the same grouping in a different rotation are recognisably the same one. If you want to know how a rhythm will feel, read its grouping.
2. The clave family
Five of Coypu's rhythms belong to one family and can be derived from each other. Following the chain is worth more than memorising five separate patterns, because it shows you why they sound related and when one will stand in for another.
Clave is Spanish for key or keystone, the piece that holds an arch together. In Afro-Cuban practice it names both the pattern and the pair of hardwood sticks that play it.
2.1 Tresillo, the seed
Three strokes across eight pulses. Almost everything else in this section can be read as an elaboration of it, and it is probably the most widespread rhythmic cell in the Atlantic world. You will find it in Cuban son, Puerto Rican bomba, Brazilian maxixe, the New Orleans second line and, essentially unchanged, in modern reggaeton.
Its power comes from the fact that 3+3+2 does not divide eight evenly. Two groups of three push against a four-square pulse, then the final two snaps back into place. Tension and resolution inside a single bar, with no harmony involved at all.
8 tresillo to: #cp.2.2 Cinquillo, or banda
Take tresillo and fill its two gaps, adding a stroke immediately after the first and the second, and you have cinquillo: five strokes in eight. The relationship is exact. Cinquillo's strokes are tresillo's, plus two more.
Coypu calls it banda, and the name is worth a moment. The same pattern is
cinquillo in Cuba, banda in Haitian Vodou drumming, and part of
moribayasa among the Malinke of Guinea. Three names, three countries, one rhythm.
It is about as direct a trace of Atlantic circulation as a pattern can leave.
Musically it runs denser and more insistent than tresillo. Where tresillo drives, cinquillo swings. Substituting one for the other is the quickest way to change the character of a groove without touching anything else.
8 banda to: #cp.2.3 Son clave
Now stretch to sixteen steps. The first half of the son clave is exactly tresillo, the same three strokes in the same places, and the second half answers with two. That is the 3–2 orientation: three strokes, then two.
This is the key pattern of Cuban son, and through son of salsa and most Afro-Cuban popular music. Every part in an ensemble is described as being "in clave", meaning aligned to it. Playing a phrase against the wrong orientation is a real error with a name of its own, being cruzado, or crossed.
Reverse the two halves and you get 2–3 clave, the same pattern rotated by eight steps. In
Coypu that is offset:.
16 claveSon to: #cp. "3–2"
16 claveSon offset: 8; to: #cp. "2–3"2.4 Rumba clave
One stroke different from the son clave. The third stroke moves from step 7 to step 8, a single pulse later, and that is the whole distinction.
The effect is out of all proportion to the change. Landing a half-pulse later puts that stroke against the grain of the pulse instead of just ahead of it, which gives rumba its harder, more forward-leaning feel. Son clave relaxes. Rumba clave pushes.
Rumba clave belongs to the secular Afro-Cuban drumming complex of guaguancó, yambú and columbia, which took shape in the solares, the tenement courtyards of Havana and Matanzas, during the nineteenth century. Note that its first half is not tresillo, unlike the son clave's.
16 rumba to: #cp.2.5 Habanera and tumbao
The habanera cell: tresillo with its second stroke doubled. In grouping terms, tresillo's middle three splits into 1+2, which is why it sounds like a decoration of the same idea rather than a new one.
It travelled unusually far. From Cuban contradanza it went into Mexican danzón and
Argentine tango, and reached early jazz by way of New Orleans. Jelly Roll Morton's "Spanish
tinge" is this figure. Coypu names it tumbao after its later life as the bass
pattern of son and salsa, where the bass characteristically avoids the downbeat and
anticipates the next bar.
It works better as a bass line than as a percussion timeline, which is what the name suggests.
(16 tumbao notes: #( 36 36 43 41 )) to: #bass.3. Puerto Rico
Bomba
One of the oldest African-derived genres in the Caribbean, developed by enslaved people on Puerto Rico's sugar plantations. The grouping gives away its character at a glance: an opening gap of three, a cluster of single-step strokes, then two. Dense in the middle, open at the edges.
What makes bomba unusual is that it inverts the normal hierarchy. The lead drum, the subidor, follows the dancer instead of the dancer following the drum. The dancer issues challenges through their movements and the drummer answers them. It is a conversation in which the percussion responds.
Plena
Plena is younger and urban, from early twentieth-century Ponce, and was known as the periódico cantado, the sung newspaper. Its songs carried news, gossip and political commentary through neighbourhoods, which made it both popular entertainment and a genuine medium of communication.
It is played on panderos, hand-held frame drums in several sizes. The grouping is palindromic, 3+2+3 then 3+2+3, giving it a rocking, balanced quality quite unlike the asymmetry of the claves.
8 bomba to: #perc.
16 plena to: #cp.16 bomba: raises an error
The note-taking variant of bomba is broken in the Coypu source, because it never
assigns its pattern. Plain 16 bomba is fine. Add notes with notes:
instead.
4. South America
Bossa nova clave
The most evenly spread pattern in the library: four gaps of three and one of four, about as close to equal as five strokes can get in sixteen steps. That evenness is what makes it the textbook example of a Euclidean rhythm.
It comes from Rio de Janeiro in the late 1950s, and is essentially João Gilberto's reduction of samba to a guitar part, samba's density stripped back to a skeleton. The restraint is the style. Bossa nova is samba played quietly.
#(5 16) euclidean
Bossa is E(5,16) in the standard Bjorklund sense, but Coypu's euclidean uses a
Bresenham variant that produces a rotation of it. For the clave itself use
16 bossa. See Rhythms: Advanced §1.1.
Cumbia clave
From Colombia's Caribbean coast, and a genuine three-way fusion of Indigenous gaita flutes, African drumming and European song forms. Its grouping repeats, 4+2+2 twice over, so it is really an eight-step idea stated twice rather than a sixteen-step pattern. That gives it a steadier, more circular feel than the claves have.
Cumbia went on to become the most widely exported rhythm in Latin America, taking root across the continent and throwing off regional variants everywhere it landed.
16 bossa to: #cp.
16 cumbiaClave to: #cp.cumbiaClave is one of the rhythms without an inline cumbiaClave:
form. Give it pitches with notes: instead. The
Rhythm Library tags which rhythms have the variant.
5. West & Central Africa
These are the traditions the Caribbean patterns descend from. The bell timelines here do the same job the claves do, and several are structurally close to them.
5.1 Shiko
Perfectly palindromic: four, two, four, two, four. Of all the sixteen-step patterns here it is the most regular and the easiest to hold onto, which is exactly what you want from a timeline that has to stay legible under a dense ensemble.
It is widespread in West African practice and travelled into Caribbean music alongside the clave family. Because it alternates long and short gaps instead of pushing against the pulse, it drives less than a clave and anchors more. Reach for it when a groove needs a foundation instead of tension.
5.2 Gahu
From the Ewe people of Ghana, Togo and Benin. Gahu is a twentieth-century recreational dance, said to have been brought home by Ewe traders returning from Nigeria. A useful reminder that these traditions are living and still absorbing material, not frozen survivals.
Its first two gaps are threes, like the son clave, but it then opens into two fours before a short two closes the cycle. The effect is of a pattern that starts urgently and relaxes, the opposite shape to most claves.
5.3 Bembé
This one needs a caveat, and an interesting one. In Afro-Cuban practice bembé names a Yoruba-derived ceremonial music, and its bell pattern is normally a seven-stroke timeline in twelve pulses, a ternary feel grouped in threes.
What Coypu implements is Godfried Toussaint's sixteen-pulse reinterpretation: six strokes spread as evenly as possible across sixteen steps. The grouping shows it plainly, 3+3+2 twice over. It keeps the syncopation of the traditional pattern while fitting a binary grid.
So it is an adaptation, not the original, and worth knowing as such. It is also the one rhythm here you can reproduce exactly with Coypu's Euclidean generator.
16 bembe to: #bell.
#( 6 16 ) euclidean to: #bell. "identical"5.4 Soukous
The odd one out, deliberately so. A single-step gap followed by a five-step gap, right at the end of the cycle. Those two adjacent strokes give soukous its forward lurch: the pattern trips, then has to wait.
Soukous itself is a story of round trips. Cuban records were imported into Kinshasa and Brazzaville during the 1940s and 50s. Congolese musicians took the son they heard, played it on electric guitars, and sent back a style that swept the whole continent. The Cuban material was itself Congolese in origin, several centuries earlier.
5.5 Adowa and sikyi
Two Ashanti dances from Ghana. Adowa is funeral and ceremonial music, played on atumpan talking drums with a bell. Sikyi is a recreational dance, lighter in function and social in setting.
The pattern is back-weighted. Its strokes fall in the second half of the cycle, leaving the first half empty, so it pulls toward the downbeat that follows instead of marking the one it starts on. Against a kick on the downbeat that produces a strong question-and-answer feel.
adowa and sikyi carry identical
arrays, so the two selectors sound the same. The distinction is documentary, about what the
music is for, rather than rhythmic.
6. Balkans & Anatolia
These two work on a different principle from everything above. Instead of subdividing a bar evenly and placing strokes inside it, they build the bar by adding unequal groups: a two, a two, a three. This is additive metre, and it is the norm across the Balkans, Turkey, Greece and much of the Middle East.
Aksak is Turkish for "limping", which describes the feel exactly. The cycle never settles into evenness because it is not made of equal parts.
Aksak
Coypu's source calls this a pseudo aksak, and the description is fair. Three strokes across ten pulses catch the unevenness without reproducing any specific traditional metre. Ten steps means it will not line up with anything on a sixteen-step grid, which is itself useful.
True aksak
This one is the real thing. Thirteen pulses grouped 2+2+2+3+2+2: five groups of two and a single three, and that lone three is where the limp lives. You feel the cycle proceeding evenly, then stretching once, before it comes round again. The box diagram above puts its group lines at the onsets rather than every four, so you can see the shape directly.
Thirteen is prime, so it shares no factor with any power-of-two grid. Run it against a sixteen-step part and the relationship takes 208 steps to repeat.
16 trueAksak truncates a thirteen-step pattern mid-cycle every time round, which
destroys the quality you wanted it for. Use 13, 26 or
39, and 10 or 20 for aksak.
7. Jungle
Three parts of one kit, all thirty-two steps long. Jungle emerged in London in the early 1990s out of hardcore rave, and its method was distinctive. Take a handful of funk breakbeats, above all the Amen break, six seconds of drumming from a 1969 B-side. Chop them into fragments. Resequence them at very high tempo over slow, dub-derived basslines.
The result runs at two speeds at once. The drums are frantic while the bass and the harmonic rhythm move at half time or slower. That doubling is the genre's signature, and it is why these patterns are 32 steps rather than 16.
jungleKick
Two strokes in thirty-two, right at the start, then nothing. The kick is this sparse because in jungle the breakbeat carries the motion. The kick marks the top of the cycle and gets out of the way.
jungleSnare
Three evenly spaced strokes and then a long gap. Against a 32-step cycle those snares land well away from where a backbeat would sit, which produces the lurching, displaced feel. The ear keeps trying to hear them as beats two and four and cannot quite manage it.
jungleRim
The busiest of the three: eight strokes in alternating twos and fours, clustered in the second half. This is the ghost-note layer, the chopped-break detail that fills the space the kick and snare leave open.
p freq: 170 bpm.
32 jungleKick to: #bd.
32 jungleSnare to: #sn.
32 jungleRim to: #rim.8. The metric family
Nine of Coypu's rhythms are not world rhythms at all. They are note values and grid divisions. They need less explaining, but they are the ones you will reach for most.
| Rhythm | What it is | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| downbeats | Every fourth step | Four to the floor. House, techno, disco |
| upbeats | The third of each group of four | Offbeat hats against a kick |
| quavers | Eighth notes | A hat bed with room left in it |
| semiquavers | Every step | Dense sixteenth-note parts |
| trigs | Every step, same output as semiquavers | When you mean "fire constantly" rather than a note value |
| rests | Nothing | Holding a slot silently, or a blank to fill in later |
| wholes | One trigger per bar, 16-step duration | Pads and sustained notes |
| semibreves | One per bar, 32-step duration | Longer sustains |
| breves | One per 32 steps | Very long notes |
downbeats and upbeats are complements, which makes them the obvious
pair. Kick on one, hat on the other, and you have the basic dance-music skeleton in two
lines. Drawn at sixteen steps the interlock is easy to see.
8 quavers
gives four triggers rather than eight. And semibreves and wholes
name the same note value without being identical in Coypu: both fire once per sixteen steps,
but semibreves sets a 32-step duration. For a note that lasts exactly its bar,
use wholes.
The remaining two, randomTrigs and randomTrigsWithProbability:,
generate a fresh pattern every time you evaluate them. They are the quickest way to get
something moving, and re-evaluating the line is itself a performance gesture.
9. Playing them together
Four principles follow from all of the above.
A worked example using nothing but rhythms from this page:
p freq: 126 bpm.
16 tumbao to: #bd. "habanera bass drum"
16 claveSon to: #cp. "the timeline, set and forget"
16 shiko to: #hh. "steady bell underneath"
8 tresillo to: #perc. "the seed, twice per cycle"
p play.
"then, while it plays, one stroke changes"
16 rumba to: #cp.Four patterns from one tradition, three of them structurally related, and a final line that alters the feel of the whole thing by moving a single stroke.
11. Troubleshooting
My clave and my kick keep colliding
A timeline wants space around it. Thin the kick, using tumbao or
downbeats rather than something busy, and keep the clave quiet but present. See
§1.
The aksak patterns sound broken
They are being truncated. Give trueAksak a multiple of 13 and aksak
a multiple of 10. See §6.
Everything sounds like it is in the wrong place
Try the other clave orientation. offset: 8 flips 3–2 to 2–3, and a phrase that
felt wrong often simply needed the other one. See §2.3.
The jungle patterns sound thin
They are meant to run together, at 160 to 175 BPM, all three at once. See §7.
Two of these rhythms sound identical
adowa and sikyi are identical in the current source, as are
semiquavers and trigs. See §5.5 and §8.
Which one should I start with?
claveSon on a clave sound and downbeats on a kick. Then swap the
clave for rumba and listen. See §2.4.