A clave is both a musical instrument and a type of rhythmic pattern.

Two wood cylinders called claves that you hit together to play a clave.

The word clave means key in Spanish, which makes sense.

Simple though it is, the clave is very much the keystone of Afro-Cuban music.

Welcome to Strong Songs, a podcast about music.

I'm your host, Kirk Hamilton, and I'm so glad that you've joined me to talk about music

with Roomba clave, music with Sony clave, and sometimes music with absolutely no clave

at all.

Strong Songs is entirely listener supported, so if you want to help me make this show, go

to patreon.com slash strong songs and sign up to become a patron.

Doing so will get you access to some pretty cool stuff, like behind the scenes videos

and a new patrons only podcast feed, so I'm going to be having a lot of fun with here

in the future.

On this episode, I'm digging into the Strong Songs mailbag to answer a whole bunch of

your musical questions with topics ranging from Minecraft time signatures to typewriter

recordings to several different questions that actually come down to the clave.

So many great emails so a little time, so hey, why don't we cut the chitchat and get

to it.

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the show.

I usually kind of script these intros out, or at least I have been in year three, but

there's no script right now.

I'm just kind of talking, and I like doing these mailbag episodes because they give me

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