I was playing a guaguanco with a friend the other day, just him improvising on a quinto and tres dos, with me holding it down on the salidor. Actually the tempo was more like a yambu. I wanted to add some strokes to my basic guaguanco to fill it out the rhythm as the other player was improvising, and I came up with adding all muff tones to the back side. I was really trying to swing it alone as we didn't have palitos. The rhythm started to really swing when I gave the phrases the feeling of starting with the open (O) tone on one side of the clave ending with the either the last bass (B) or muff (M) tone on the other side, and then starting a new phrase with the next open (O) tone, etc.
Actually, this is exactly the way Michael Spiro teaches it in his book. What do you know? It works!
The different tone quality of the muff tones on one side and bass tones on the other created a sweet little call and response feel, like a quick little conversation. Anyways, I really dug the feel of it. I tried it out later with when we had a third player on the tres dos, and it works with that part as well. The tones of the muffs sort of accent the higher pitch of the tres dos open tones that coincide with them, working with the tres dos, instead of playing over it.
So here's the transcription. I haven't seen the part written like this anywhere before. Try it out and let me know how it goes. Just click on the image a couple times to enlarge it. Feel free to print it out and play.
