98 BPM
Drums
Bass
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
4/4 ×2
Drag rhythmic values into up to 8 beat blocks per line to build a drum groove, or click a tile then click a block to place it — handy on a trackpad.
The clave — a simple five-stroke pattern (heard here on the rimshot) — is the rhythmic key that everything else in Afro-Cuban music locks onto; nothing quite fits together until you can feel it. It grew out of the fusion of Spanish and West/Central African (especially Bantu-Kongo) musical traditions in 19th- and early-20th-century Cuba, particularly around Havana and Matanzas, and underlies son, rumba, mambo, and salsa alike. This groove pairs the 3-2 son clave with a syncopated "tumbao" bass line (traditionally played on the low conga) — the same interlocking feel salsa inherited decades later.
Slot A is the core groove; switch to B, C, and D above for variations on it — a genuine stylistic twist, a busier or sparser take, and a fill or break, the same way a real performance of this rhythm would vary it. Press play to hear it, slow the tempo down to study it, or drag the beat blocks apart to see exactly how it's built.
It is free and needs no login. Nothing you change here is saved, so use it as a reference or as the starting point for a beat of your own — then open the RockBlocks drum machine to build from scratch.