A flamenco cuadro can be one singer and one guitarist or a full stage with dancers and a row of hand-clappers, and the job every one of them shares is the same: keep the compás. A palo runs on a cycle of counts that repeats under the whole performance, only some of those counts are accented, and the whole cuadro has to agree about which ones and where the cycle starts. The seats below are five different ways of holding that count.
The guitar is not ours. It is borrowed from the network: a flamenco guitar is strung with nylon and tuned like a classical guitar, and the network’s nylon-strung classical guitar has its deep home on String Warrior, the hub — every reference page below links to the same page there. What you get here instead is the flamenco reading: the same chord or scale, framed by how the toque carries it through a cycle of counts.
Four seats without a reference section
Four more seats make up a cuadro, and none of them gets a chord or scale section here. The reason is the same for all four and it is structural: every diagram on this site is drawn from the network’s shared fretted-instrument registry, and none of these four is a fretted instrument — nor does any registry in the network model them, so there is no sister site to send you to for any of them.
Cante
The sung verse the whole cuadro serves. The guitar waits for it, fills the gaps it leaves, and never lets a line start off the count; a singer may stretch a line, but the compás underneath does not stretch with it.
Palmas
The compás made audible — hand-clapping on the accented counts, or on the counts between them, so that everyone on stage can hear where the cycle is at any moment. Two clappers often split the work, one on the main counts and one in between.
Cajón
A box drum played with the hands, sat on by its player: low strokes and high strokes that double the accents of the cycle and push the counts between them.
Baile
The dance. The footwork answers the accents of the cycle, and the dancer’s marks tell the guitar when a section is about to close — which is why a guitarist accompanying dance has to know exactly where in the count the dancer is.
