Candombe — the Afro-Uruguayan drum music of Montevideo, played in the street by comparsas of tamboriles: the chico (small, high), the repique (middle, the improviser) and the piano (large, low). It runs on a sixteenth-note grid in 4/4 and is as central to Uruguay as samba is to Brazil.
How it sits: the clave layer is the madera — the stick on the drum's wooden shell, a five-stroke figure close to a 3-2 son clave packed into one bar; every drummer plays it before entering. The chico (conga-hi) is the motor: silent on each beat, two strokes after it. The piano (conga-lo) plays its base pattern with open strokes on 2 and the and of 3. The repique plays the madera on the shell (rim) in bar 1 and answers with a hand-and-stick phrase in bar 2.
Listen for the chico's hole on every beat — the downbeat is felt, not played.
Practice: clap the madera while saying the four beats, then add the chico's two strokes on the tongue.