Reading the cycle

The cycle as a wheel

The fastest way to feel a Gnawa cycle is to draw it as a clock. Twelve sub-pulses tick around the rim. Four of them — at 12, 3, 6, and 9 — are the beats: the strong moments where the bass usually lands. The krakeb hits every sub-pulse, one tick at a time.

Larger ember dots = beats (where the bass falls). Small grey dots = sub-pulses. Short tick marks crossing the ring = krakeb hits, one per sub-pulse.

From wheel to grid

On the site, that circle is unrolled into a left-to-right grid. Each row is one track (string 1, string 2, string 3, krakeb, claps). Each column is one of the 48 cells in a cycle (12 sub-pulses × 4 sub-divisions = 48 fine-grained slots).

What to look for when you read a tab:

• ○ on a string row — play that string open.
• 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 on a string row — stop the string at position p1 / p2 / p3 / p4.
• Bolder ring around a note — accent: pluck this one harder.
• A note’s width — how long it rings. A wide block means hold; a thin block means a short, percussive note.
• Krakeb / claps rows — small dark blocks indicate hits; their density tells you the sub-division.

Read this

The exercise below cycles twice. Each cycle contains every symbol the grid uses: an open accented bass, a fretted p1, an open accented bass again, a fretted p2, plus krakeb on every pulse and claps on the last two beats. Play it, watch the green playhead, and try to predict each row a beat ahead.

When this clicks

You can now open any tab in the Patterns or Repertoire library and read along. The denser pieces have more notes, but the alphabet is the same: open, fretted, accent, length, percussion. Next we’ll start using the fretted side of that alphabet for real.