Coypu's named rhythms are not decorative presets. Nearly all of them are timelines from living traditions, and most are related to one another. This page explains 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 concept does not have a good European equivalent. A timeline is a short, asymmetric pattern, usually struck on a bell or two sticks, that repeats without variation for the entire duration of a piece. Everyone else — drummers, dancers, singers — orients to it.
It is not a rhythm section keeping time in the Western sense, because it does not mark the beat evenly. It is closer to a shared coordinate system. Its asymmetry is the point: because the pattern is uneven, every position within it is distinguishable, so a player always knows exactly where they are in the cycle. An even pattern could not do that.
This is why a timeline never develops, never fills, and never drops out. In Coypu terms it is the part you set once and leave alone while everything else changes around it.
1.1 Reading a grouping
Throughout this page each rhythm is given by its grouping: the gaps between successive strokes, wrapping round the cycle. Tresillo is 3+3+2 — a stroke, three steps later another, three later another, and two steps back to the start.
The grouping tells you far more than the step count does. Two patterns of the same length with different groupings are entirely different rhythms; two with the same grouping in a different rotation are recognisably the same one. When you want to know what a rhythm feels like, read its grouping.
2. The clave family
Five of Coypu's rhythms belong to a single family, and they can be derived from one another. Understanding the chain is worth more than memorising the five patterns, because it explains why they sound related and when to substitute one 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 every other rhythm in this section can be read as an elaboration of it, and it is probably the single most widespread rhythmic cell in the Atlantic world: Cuban son, Puerto Rican bomba, Brazilian maxixe, the New Orleans second line, and — essentially unchanged — modern reggaeton.
Its power is that 3+3+2 does not divide eight evenly. Two groups of three push against a four-square pulse and the final two snap back into place, which produces 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 the two gaps — add 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 dwelling on. 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 —
about as direct a trace of Atlantic circulation as a pattern can be.
Musically it is denser and more insistent than tresillo, and it swings where tresillo drives. Substituting one for the other is the easiest way to change the character of a groove without changing anything else.
8 banda to: #cp.2.3 Son clave
Now stretch to sixteen steps. The son clave's first half is exactly tresillo — the same three strokes in the same places — and its 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, and playing a phrase against the wrong orientation is a real error with a name — being cruzado, crossed.
Reverse the halves and you get 2–3 clave, which is 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 entire distinction.
The effect is out of all proportion to the change. Landing a half-pulse later puts that stroke against the grain of the four-square pulse instead of just before it, which is what gives rumba its harder, more forward-leaning feel. Son clave relaxes; rumba clave pushes.
Rumba clave belongs to the secular Afro-Cuban drumming complex — guaguancó, yambú, columbia — which took shape in the solares, the tenement courtyards of Havana and Matanzas, in 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 the second stroke doubled. It is tresillo's 3+3+2 with the middle three split into 1+2, which is why it sounds like a decorated version 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 its 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 shows its character immediately: an opening gap of three, then 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 rather than the dancer following the drum. The dancer issues challenges with their movements and the drummer answers. It is a conversation with the percussion in the responding role.
Plena
Plena is younger and urban — 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 of different sizes. The grouping is palindromic — 3+2+3 then 3+2+3 — which gives it a rocking, balanced quality quite unlike the clave patterns' asymmetry.
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 — 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, which is as close to equal as five strokes can get in sixteen steps. That even-ness is exactly 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 its 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: Indigenous gaita flutes, African drumming, and European song forms. Its grouping repeats — 4+2+2, twice — so it is really an eight-step idea stated twice rather than a sixteen-step pattern, which gives it a steadier, more circular feel than the claves.
Cumbia became the most widely exported rhythm in Latin America, taking root across the continent and generating 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 precisely what you want from a timeline that has to stay audible 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 rather than pushing against the pulse, it drives less than a clave and anchors more. Use it when a groove needs a foundation rather than 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 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 it is 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 distributed as evenly as possible across sixteen steps. The grouping shows it clearly — 3+3+2, twice. It keeps the syncopation of the traditional pattern while fitting a binary grid.
It is an adaptation rather than 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, and deliberately so: a single-step gap followed by a five-step gap, right at the end of the cycle. Those two adjacent strokes are what give soukous its forward lurch — the pattern trips and then has to wait.
Soukous itself is a story of round trips. Cuban records were imported into Kinshasa and Brazzaville in 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 rather than 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 — 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 within 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: a cycle that 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 captures 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 is. You feel the cycle proceeding evenly and then stretching, once, before it comes round.
Thirteen is prime, so it shares no factor with any power-of-two grid. Running it against a sixteen-step part gives you a relationship that takes 208 steps to repeat.
16 trueAksak truncates a thirteen-step pattern mid-cycle every time round, which
destroys exactly the quality you wanted. Use 13, 26,
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, and resequence them at very high tempo over slow, dub-derived basslines.
The result runs at two speeds at once. The drums are frantic; 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, and 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 is what produces the lurching, displaced feel — the ear keeps trying to hear them as beats two and four and cannot.
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.
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 explanation, but they are the ones you will use 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 |
| 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.
8 quavers
gives four triggers, not eight. And semibreves and wholes name the
same note value but are not identical in Coypu: both fire once per sixteen steps, yet
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 on every evaluation. 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 that follow from everything 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. Thin the kick — tumbao or downbeats rather
than something busy — and keep the clave quiet but present. §1.
The aksak patterns sound broken
They are being truncated. Give trueAksak a multiple of 13 and
aksak a multiple of 10 — §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 — §2.3.
The jungle patterns sound thin
They are meant to run together, at 160–175 BPM, all three at once — §7.
Two of these rhythms sound identical
adowa and sikyi are identical in the current source, as are
semiquavers and trigs — §5.5, §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 — §2.4.