Ndombolo

What it is

Halfway through a Congolese rumba record the singing stops and the band goes into the sebene, an open section where the lead guitar repeats a figure and the dancers take over. Ndombolo is what happens when the sebene eats the whole song. It arrived in Kinshasa in the mid nineties out of soukous, and the engine underneath it is the cavacha, a snare pattern Zaiko Langa Langa's drummers worked out in the seventies that chugs on the offbeats like a train. Pairs of snare hits, quiet then loud, on the and and the a of every beat. Koffi Olomide, Wenge Musica, Fally Ipupa and Awilo Longomba built careers on it, and it is still the sound of a Kinshasa street bar at midnight.

What it sounds like

Guitar-led and busy in the top half. Two or three electric guitars, clean, picked fast, with the lead playing a repeated figure high on the neck for minutes at a time. The kit is dry and bright with the snare tuned high and the wires loose. Bass plays a walking figure rather than roots. The atalaku, a shouter whose whole job is animation and crowd names, sits over everything. Recordings are compressed hard and the top end is pushed, so the snare chug and the guitar occupy the same range and interlock rather than separate.

Key elements

• The cavachaSnare pairs on the and and the a of every beat, the first around velocity 50 and the second above 90. Eight strokes a bar and the whole genre rides on them.
• Hats on the front halfClosed hats on the beat and the e of each beat only, which is exactly the half of the bar the snare leaves alone. The two lanes tile the sixteenths between them.
• A kick that skips beat 2Beat 1, the and of 2, beat 3, beat 4 and the and of 4. Beat 2 itself is left to the snare, and the bass walks through the gap.
• The sebeneA repeated lead guitar figure over three chords that runs for as long as the dancers want. Structurally this is the song, not a section of it.
• The atalakuA shouted animation part naming people and calling dance moves. It is a rhythm instrument as much as a vocal and it lands on the snare accents.

How to get them

• Build the cavacha by pairsProgram a quiet snare on the and of each beat and a loud one on the a. Get the velocity gap to at least forty before you add anything, because that gap is what makes it chug rather than rattle.
• Tile the hatsPut the closed hat only where the snare is silent, on the beat and the e. Every sixteenth in the bar then belongs to one lane or the other, which is why it drives so hard.
• Snare soundTuned high, wires slack, decay under 100 milliseconds, high-passed at 300Hz. A fat snare struck eight times a bar turns into mud within two bars.
• GuitarClean, bridge pickup, picked with a plectrum, playing a two bar figure over and over. Track a second guitar an octave down playing a simpler version of the same shape.
• BassWalk it. Ndombolo bass moves through the chord in eighths rather than sitting on roots, and the kick leaves beat 2 open specifically so it can.
• StraightSwing 0.5. The cavacha pairs are a sixteenth apart and swing widens that gap unevenly, which turns the chug into a limp.

Reference points

Zaiko Langa Langa, Wenge Musica, Koffi Olomide, Awilo Longomba, Fally Ipupa, Werrason, and the drummers who worked out the cavacha in seventies Kinshasa. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.