While they originated in Cuba, their incorporation into the popular and folk music of other countries has resulted in diversification of terminology for the instruments and the players.

Modern congas, developed in the early 1950s, use a screw-and-lug tension head system, which makes them easier to tune (or detune).

This modern type of tension system was pioneered in Cuba by Carlos "Patato" Valdés and in the United States by Cándido Camero.

In ensembles that traditionally employ a large number of drums, such as comparsas and rumba groups, a detailed naming system is used, which has been taken up by major conga manufacturers.

Another important consideration is that head tension can greatly impact the ease or unease of the player, and generally a looser drumhead can lead to hand injury more than a tighter one, because a looser drumhead has less rebound and more muffling effect (hence potentially bruising joints and bones under spirited playing).

When two or more drums are used, there is the potential for more variation of which notes are chosen; however, tuning between or during compositions is rare in live performance.

With only two drums, it is common to find them tuned a perfect fourth apart (the interval between the first two notes of "Here Comes the Bride") as is the tradition in western classical music for the timpani.

The deslizado, moose call or glissando is done by rubbing the third finger, supported by the thumb, across the head of the drum.

The finger is sometimes moistened with saliva or sweat, and sometimes a little coat of beeswax is put on the surface of the conga head to help make the sound.

To bend the pitch of the congas, a conguero sometimes uses his elbow to shift around on and apply pressure to different parts of the head; this causes the note to change.

The following nine-measure quinto excerpt is from the guaguancó “La polémica” by Los Muñequitos de Matanzas (1988).

By alternating between the lock and the cross, the quinto creates larger rhythmic phrases that expand and contract over several clave cycles.

Los Muñequintos quintero Jesús Alfonso (1949–2009) described this phenomenon as a man getting “drunk at a party, going outside for a while, and then coming back inside.”[10] The basic son montuno conga pattern is called marcha, or tumbao.

Beginning in the late 1960s, band conga players began incorporating elements from folkloric rhythms, especially rumba.

The feeling of the high drum part is like the quinto in rumba, constantly punctuating, coloring, and accenting, but not soloing until the appropriate moment (Santos 1985).

Tomás Cruz developed several adaptations of folkloric rhythms when working in Paulito FG's timba band of the 1990s.

The example on the right is one of Cruz's inventos ('musical inventions'), a band adaptation of the Congolese-based Afro-Cuban folkloric rhythm makuta.

The conga repertoire includes many other rhythms found in genres such as danzón, mambo and cha-cha-cha, as well as foreign styles that have adopted Afro-Cuban percussion such as Jamaican reggae, Brazilian samba and bossa nova, and American soul, funk, Latin jazz and Latin rock.

In the 1960s, the conga became a prominent instrument in Haitian popular music styles such as konpa, yeye and mini-djaz.

In merengue típico (or cibaeño), the rhythm is usually more complex and less standardized; it can range from simply hitting the conga on a fourth beat to playing full patterns that mark the time.