Once you understand Son Clave and fine-tune your inner clave clock, you need to connect with your instrument. Sometimes our musical brain move quicker than our fingers, and concepts we’ve mastered academically don’t easily translate to our instrument. These exercises are designed to extend your inner clave clock to your musical output.

1. Apply Your Mastery of the Pulse and Clave to Your Instrument
Start by reviewing the basics – play clave on your instrument while tapping the pulse with your foot. Use the recordings below to assist your practice sessions. The audio files play clave in cut time at 98 bpm with the clave in the right ear and the pulse in the left ear. Practice both clave directions, and when comfortably playing clave, use a metronome to try different tempos. Once you solidify that relationship, play the pulse and tap the clave with your foot.
Pulse & 2-3 Son Clave
Pulse & 3-2 Son Clave

2. Add Melodic Content to Your Mastery of Clave
Playing clave and the pulse may be a breeze for you, so add melodic content into the mix. Challenge yourself to build both theoretical information and a rhythmic foundation simultaneously. Concentrating upon multiple music concepts requires more focus, but results in more efficient practice sessions.

Play an ascending and descending triad through one clave cycle. Once you understand how the triad fits into the clave rhythm, move through all twelve key centers in one chord quality. Then change the clave direction and play all 12 key centers of another chord quality. Next use inversions as your melodic content while playing clave. Vary this exercise in different ways and create new challenges for yourself.

Ninth chords also work well against the clave cycle. Play the five notes of a Ninth chord using clave’s five rhythmic attacks. Since you just ran through individual triads, challenge yourself by applying the ninth chords to a chord progression. Try a ii9-V9-Imaj9 chord progression using clave as your rhythmic basis. Once you have moved that chord progression through all 12 key centers, try another progression. Some possibilities might be a minor ii-V progression or a major ii-vi-ii-V progression.

3. Creating Melodic Rhythmic Ideas With Lead-In Notes
Once basic melodic material feels comfortable with clave, alter it by inserting eighth notes before the clave attacks. Start by adding an eighth note before one clave attack and build up to eighth notes before every piece of clave. Maintain a slight emphasis upon the clave and feel the preceding notes leading into the main accent points. Experiment with a variety of combinations, and take the time to create ideas with both 2-3 and 3-2 clave. You will end up with a book full of rhythmic variations that provide diversity and align precisely with clave.

Practice with a simple one-chord descarga, keeping your focus upon rhythmic development. The audio file below uses a Bb7 chord and 2-3 clave. Emphasize the clave attacks by placing chord tones on them. Play either be scale tones or chromatic leading tones as lead-in notes. Move through a variety of short rhythmic figure until your feel comfortable, and then play longer phrases. Create a melodic shape to your line, but keep the rhythmic emphasis firmly based in clave.
Bb7 Descarga Play-Along

Good luck!

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