The huehuetl is a tubular Aztec drum that is made of wood that is covered with a skin at the top and not at the bottom and stands on three legs carved out of its base. Drummers strike the huēhuētl with either hands or a mallet.
COUNTRY: Mexico
KEY GENRES: Aztec
FEATURED ON: Mayan Peace Song (AATW: Latin America)
The viheula is a stringed instrument that is central to Mexico’s mariachi music. A relative of the guitar, it originated in Europe, particularly in Spain, and traveled to the New World along with Spanish conquistadores.
COUNTRY: Mexico
KEY GENRES: Mariachi
The guitarron is a really big, really deep 6 string bass that is common to Mexican Mariachi groups. It has six thick strings–the bottom three are most often metal, the top three nylon. Because it’s so big it can be very loud, and doesn’t require amplification in small to medium-sized performances.
COUNTRY: Mexico
KEY GENRES: Mariachi
A marimbula is a Latin/Caribbean percussion instrument that appears to be a cross between a cajon and a mbira (thumb piano). The marimbula has its roots in Africa but first appeared in Latin America in Cuba in the 19th century. Musicians used the thick metal strips that are attached to its wooden front to play bass notes in a developing genre of Afro-Cuban music known as changui. The instrument spread across the region and today appears in genres of music such as Dominican merengue and Mexico’s Son Jarocho.
COUNTRY: Cuba, Dominican Republic, Mexico
KEY GENRES: Changui, Merengue, Son Jarocho
FEATURED ON: La Guacamaya (AATW: Latin America)
A tarima is a rectangular wooden platform that doubles as both a stage for dancing and a percussion instrument during a Mexican son jarocho fandango. Son Jarocho dancers wear hard-soled shows in order to make substantial sounds on the tarima when they dance.
COUNTRY: Mexico
KEY GENRES: Son Jarocho
FEATURED ON: La Guacamaya (AATW: Latin America)
“Requinto’ is a term used in both Spanish and Portuguese that refers to an instrument that is a smaller version of another instrument. For example, the requinto guitar, which is part of the customary Mexican son jarocho ensemble, is proportionally smaller than a normal guitar. In Puerto Rican plena, “requinto” refers to a small hand drum that has a high enough tone to improvise over the sounds of other instruments.
COUNTRY: Mexico, Puerto Rico
KEY GENRES: : Plena, Son Jarocho
FEATURED ON: La Guacamaya (AATW: Latin America)
The Son Jarocho harp (the arpa jarochoa) is a harp that has become one of the main instruments in son jarocho music of Veracruz, Mexico. Musicians pluck the harp’s strings deliberately and often play the music’s melody.
COUNTRY: Mexico
KEY GENRES: Son Jarocho
The marimba is a kind of Central American xylophone that is a descendant of the African balafon. Musicians in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, rearranged the balafon’s wooden bars and developed the marimba, which has a particularly broad range of tones.
COUNTRY: Guatemala
KEY GENRES: Guatemalan Marimba
The Maya civilization, dominant for over a thousand years–most so from the years 200 to 900 A.D.–in the lands we now know as Mexcio and Guatemala, was full and rich and certainly included volumes of Many music, but since there was no recording mechanism at the time, and because the Maya didn’t use musical notation, almost all of it has been lost. Spanish conquerors from the 16th century did note some Mayan music and learned enough about lingering Mayan rituals that ethnomusicoligists and anthropologists are confident that music was central to Mayan ceremonies and life events. The Maya favored flutes and drums and built their instruments from the nature around them–they used conch shells for trumpets and turtle shells as drums. The Mayan song Xtoles is believed to be one of the world’s oldest continually sung melodies. Watch a performance by Mexico’s Coro Universitario Estudiantil.
COUNTRY: Guatemala, Mexico
KEY INSTRUMENTS: Conches and other natural trumpets, Flutes, Maracas, Tortoisehell drums, Whistles
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COUNTRY: Cuba, Mexico, United States
Mambo:
In the 1930s, Cuban big band musicians added some elements of son to danzón to form an up-tempo dance music called MAMBO. The mambo is based on the 3-2 clave and uses a 4/4 beat (look above and at the Everything is a Drum rhythmic overview for a hint about what this means), with a dancer counting “quick quick slow,” moving his/her feet on the second beat of the four beat phrase, shifting weight to the other foot on the third, and returning to the original foot on the fourth. In other words, “1-2-3, 5-6-7.” MAMBO became most popular not in Cuba, but in Cuban refugee communities in New York and Mexico City. About the MAMBO | In Havana, dancing the MAMBO
