Rhythm Atlas · 4 of 10
Rhythm Atlas · Lesson 4 of 10
Reggaeton: The Dembow 3+3+2
Four snare hits, arranged in the oldest spacing in popular music. Measured from a reference master: the gaps are exactly 3, 5, 3, 5 sixteenths — the tresillo — and the timing is dead straight.
Waveform — the dembow grid, rendered in the lab
Measured — the snare’s spacing, in eighth-notes
3+3+2 tresillo
One cell of rhythm, three names: tresillo, dembow, the reggaeton beat. Learn to hear 3+3+2 and you’ll start hearing it everywhere — including the next lesson, where two drums share it.
Step 1
The most repeated rhythm on earth fits in four hits
Reggaeton’s dembow is a snare pattern: steps 4, 7, 12, 15 over a plain four-floor kick at 95 BPM. We measured the reference master and the spacing is exact — this is the tresillo rhythm, 3+3+2, that runs from dancehall through reggaeton to half the pop charts. If you can count the gaps, you can program the genre.
Step 2
Count it in gaps, not positions
Positions are hard to feel; gaps are easy. From the first snare: +3 steps, +5, +3, +5 — the 5s are the 2 of the 3+3+2 wrapping across the bar line and the middle. Clap the gaps once and the pattern is memorised for life. Then hear it at full weight:
Count the snare’s gaps: 4→7 is 3 steps, 7→12 is 5 (the 2 across the bar’s middle, wrapped), 12→15 is 3, 15→4 is 5. Read as accents around the bar it’s the tresillo — 3+3+2 eighth-notes — wearing a snare.
Step 3
Straight is a feature
The measured swing on this master is 50.9% — which is to say, none. The dembow’s bounce comes from the 3+3+2 spacing against the metronome kick, not from timing slop. Producers who "humanise" a dembow blur the exact thing that makes it read. Leave the grid alone; choose sounds with shorter decays instead, so the gaps stay audible.
Try it in the browser — free, nothing to install
Beat MakerThis grid, loaded for you — the dembow at 95 BPM on the site sequencer, free packs’ soundsPattern PlayerThe free MIDI patterns in three voices — the Listen tabCheck your work
Failure checkCommon failure: evening out the gaps
Quantising the snare toward the beats — or nudging step 7 to step 8 "for symmetry" — flattens the tresillo into a march. The asymmetry is the rhythm. If your dembow feels stiff, count the gaps out loud before you touch a note: 3, 5, 3, 5, or it isn’t the pattern.
One rhythm, three lessons
The 3+3+2 under this snare is the same cell that runs the next lesson’s whole drum kit — Dancehall builds its entire kick-and-snare union out of it. There’s no reggaeton pack in our catalog; the pattern itself is the product here, and it’s free: load it into the Beat Maker below (sounds: the Free Drum One-Shots) and save your own loop as a WAV.
Keep learning
Rhythm Atlas · Next
Dancehall: One Rhythm, Two Drums
The same 3-3-2 cell, split across kick and snare until it becomes one rhythm.
Next lessonRhythm Atlas · Previous
Lo-Fi: Swing Is One Late Hit
The dembow is dead straight. Lo-fi is the opposite lesson: swing as a single placed offset.
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