Bell pattern

In band music, bell patterns are also played on the metal shell of the timbales, and drum kit cymbals.

The use of iron bells (gongs) in sub-Saharan African music is linked to the early iron-making technology spread by the great Bantu migrations.

Throughout Africa, wherever these gongs have occurred they have been manufactured by the same process of welding the two halves together along a wide flange.

[10] Kubik further states that key patterns represent the structural core of a musical piece, something like a condensed and extremely concentrated expression of the motional possibilities open to the participants (musicians and dancers).

The "ti"s sound pulses in between the bell strokes, by raising the gourd in an upward motion and striking it with the free hand.

By ending at the beginning of the cycle, the axatse part contributes to the cyclic nature of the overall rhythm.

Three-over-eight (3:8) is one of the most metrically contradictive, and extraordinarily dynamic cross-rhythms found in African music.

The kadodo bell pattern is an embellishment of three "slow" cross-beats spanning two measures, or three-over-eight (3:8).

The most basic single-celled pattern in duple-pulse structure consists of three strokes, known in Cuban music as tresillo.

However, perhaps because of their seemingly asymmetric structure, bell patterns are sometimes perceived in an additive rhythmic form.

[26] The bell pattern, and every aspect of the overall rhythm, is considered divisive within both cultural understanding, and by most contemporary music theoreticians.

"[41] Kubik concurs: "Although on the level of structural analysis it cannot be denied that different 'distances' of strokes, combining two or three elementary pulses, are 'added up' within the cycle, performers do not think of time-line patterns as 'additive rhythms,' .

It arises as a kind of default grouping mechanism for those transcribers who either disregard the choreography or fail to accord it foundational status.

Those who wish to convey a sense of the rhythm’s background [main beats], and who understand the surface morphology in relation to a regular subsurface articulation, will prefer the divisive format.

Those who imagine the addition of three, then three, then two sixteenth notes will treat the well-formedness of 3+3+2 as fortuitous, a product of grouping rather than of metrical structure.

They will be tempted to deny that African music has a bona fide metrical structure because of its frequent departures from normative grouping structure—Agawu (2003: 87).

A.M. Jones correctly identified the importance of this key pattern, but he mistook its accents as indicators of meter rather than the counter-metric (cross-rhythmic) phenomena they actually are.

Because the main beats are usually emphasized in the steps and not the music, it is often difficult for an "outsider" to feel the proper metric structure without seeing the dance component.

Kubik states: "In order to understand the motional structure of any music in Africa, one has to look at the dancers as well and see how they relate to the instrumental background" (2010: 78).

Those not familiar with the choreographic supplement, however, sometimes have trouble locating the main beats and expressing them in movement.

Hearing African music on recordings alone without prior grounding in its dance-based rhythms may not convey the choreographic supplement.

Some of the Afro-Cuban rhythms that use the standard pattern are: Congolese (Bantu): palo, triallo; Lucumí (Yoruba): iyesá (128 form), bembé, agbe; Arará (Fon): sabalú, egbado; "Haitiano" (Fon, Yoruba): vodú-radá, yanvalú, nagó; the rumba form columbia.

[53] In the Yoruba-based, Afro-Cuban rhythms agbe (toque güiro) and bembé, standard pattern variations are used spontaneously.

The bell pattern is also played in a displaced position, beginning on 4a, the pulse immediately preceding beat 1.

The Arará are Cuban descendants of the Fon/Ewe ethnic group, so it's perhaps not surprising that it is the same pattern as the bell part used in the Ewe rhythm kadodo, shown earlier in this article.

A variety of Cuban 44 bell patterns have spread worldwide due to the global success of Cuban-based popular music.

During the mambo era of the 1940s, bongo players began regularly using a large hand-held cowbell during the montuno section in son groups.

The rhythmic basis for one of the most enduring Latin jazz tunes comes from a cáscara variant adopted as a mambo bell pattern.

"Manteca," co-written by Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo in 1947, is the first jazz standards to be rhythmically based on clave.

During the early 1940s Machito and his Afro-Cubans was the first band to employ the triumvirate of congas, bongos and timbales, the standard battery of percussion used in contemporary salsa.