Cumbia

What it is

Start with the llamador. It is the smallest drum in a Colombian coastal ensemble, it plays the offbeat and only the offbeat, and its name means the caller. Everything else is arranged around that: a bombo marking the frame, a tambor alegre improvising over the top, a guacharaca scraping, and a gaita flute or an accordion carrying the tune. That is cumbia on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, where it comes from indigenous, African and Spanish sources at once and has been argued over for two centuries. From the 1940s the big orchestras in Barranquilla put it on records, from the 1960s it spread across Mexico, Peru, Argentina and Chile and became a different music in each of them, and it has never stopped moving.

What it sounds like

Hand drums with the heads warm and slightly damp, recorded with a lot of room. The bombo is a deep single note with a wooden click on the rim. The alegre is bright and cutting with plenty of slap in it. The guacharaca is a ridged wooden tube dragged with a fork, and it is dry, mid-forward and constant. Over that: a gaita, a long duct flute with a beeswax head that sounds breathy and slightly out of tune, or a button accordion in the vallenato style. Bass is simple and low. The old orchestral records add horns and a full brass arrangement without changing the drums.

Key elements

• The llamadorOne small drum, on the offbeat eighths, at a fixed volume, for the length of the piece. It is the single most identifiable thing in the rhythm and it never moves.
• The bombo and its rimThe big drum plays the head on beats 1 and 3 and the wooden rim on 2 and 4, so one player produces two completely different sounds in alternation.
• The tambor alegreThe improvising hand drum, working in the spaces the llamador leaves. It changes from bar to bar and responds to the singer or the flute.
• The guacharacaA ridged tube scraped with a wire fork, running a long stroke and two short ones, over and over. It does the job a hi-hat would do in music from anywhere else.
• Gaita or accordionA cane flute with a beeswax and feather mouthpiece, or a diatonic accordion. Both play short repeating figures rather than melodies with a beginning and an end.

How to get them

• Llamador firstProgram the offbeat eighths at a constant 96 and do not humanise them, do not vary them and do not add a fill. Every producer's instinct is to make that lane more interesting and every one of them is wrong.
• BomboTwo samples: a deep damped drum around 70Hz for the head strokes and a dry wooden knock for the rim. Alternate them rather than layering, because on the instrument they are two different places to hit.
• GuacharacaGM has a guiro but nothing for a guacharaca, and both percussion lanes here are already drums, so the scrape stays split across the hi-hat rows: the open one for the long downward stroke, the closed one for the short returns. Load a guacharaca over both.
• AlegreA high hand drum with an open tone and a slap, written differently in each bar. Put its strokes on the sixteenths the llamador does not occupy and check the two lanes side by side.
• GaitaIf you are sampling a flute, pitch it about a quarter tone off and add breath noise. A clean in-tune flute sample over this rhythm sounds like a library track.
• SwingStraight. The lean in cumbia comes from hand drums pushing and pulling by a few milliseconds, so nudge the alegre off the grid rather than applying a swing amount to everything.

Reference points

Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto, Totó la Momposina, Lucho Bermudez, Pacho Galan, Andres Landero, Alfredo Gutierrez, Discos Fuentes generally, and the Peruvian and Mexican scenes that took it on. Named as reference points, not as endorsements.