Counts 1 2 3 4 | 5 6 7 8
Learn first Lesson 3: Eighth notes
Tangos are the main four-beat palo of flamenco: festive, moderately fast and with a rolling, swinging feel. They developed in the nineteenth century between Cádiz and Seville, with local styles from Triana, Jerez, Málaga and Granada, and they share their compás with the slower tientos. The Argentine tango is a separate and later tradition.
Tangos are counted in fours, usually paired into an eight-count phrase, and written in 4/4 or 2/4. The defining feature is the silent 1: the first beat of each group of four is felt, often with the foot or a low drum note, but left out of the basic palmas, which fall on 2, 3 and 4. This page counts 1 to 8 across two bars of 4/4, one click per beat, with a stronger click on 1 and 5 so that you can feel the beats you leave out.
| Pattern | Count |
|---|---|
| Counts | 1 2 3 4 | 5 6 7 8 |
| Basic palmas | · 2 3 4 | · 6 & 7 8 (· = silent) |
| Phrase end | … 6 & [7], then 8 silent |
Studio Flamenco gives the standard pattern as two groups of four: claps on 2, 3 and 4 in the first, and the same in the second with an extra clap on the 'and' after its second beat. The two groups can also be repeated on their own. In their mathematical study of flamenco rhythm, Díaz-Báñez and colleagues describe the same soft first beat as the clapping pattern shared by all the binary flamenco styles, including rumba, farruca and garrotín.
Contratiempo palmas fill the offbeats between the beats, usually played by a second palmero over the basic pattern. Studio Flamenco notes that a phrase generally ends on the third beat of the second group, count 7, which gives a remate (a closing accent), and that dancers place remates between lines of the song as well as at the ends of sections.
Tangos cover a wide range of speeds. An automatic analysis of recorded cante in the COFLA research corpus found fast tangos mostly between 140 and 180 beats per minute and the slower tientos near 90, and one commercial flamenco metronome covers 90 to 180. A performance often starts with tientos and speeds up into tangos.
The most common mistake is clapping on 1 out of habit. The next is rushing the extra clap after 6 so that it crowds 7; place it exactly halfway between the two beats.