Conga marcha

Every exercise here grades you on finding "the one" — count 1, the downbeat that opens the phrase. New to that? The counting salsa lesson covers it first.

The conga marcha is a one-measure pattern that repeats identically forever: a slap on beat 2, paired open tones on beat 4 and its "&", nothing on beat 1. Unlike the clave, it has no asymmetry to give away which measure comes first: loop it, and every measure sounds exactly like the last one.

Both downbeats ringed above (count 1 and count 5) are correct answers here. That's not a bug: a bare conga genuinely can't tell you which half of the phrase you're in, so this exercise grades you on locking onto the pulse itself, not on resolving an ambiguity the instrument doesn't resolve either.