Santería Music Database

Welcome to the Santería music database, a collection of information about afro-cuban folkloric music. The main purpose of this database is to cross-reference the different resources and recordings to the batá drum rhythms ("toques") and chants ("cantos") of the Santería religion.

Here you will find:

• A list and brief description of the orishas;
• A list of Batá drums rhythms (toques);
• A list of Chants (cantos);
• A list of albums containing recordings of this beautiful music;
• Pointers to transcriptions of cantos and/or toques.

Throughout this web site, you will notice that the pages and links are color-coded to the type of information it refers to. Use the main navigation bar at the top of every page to browse the various information. This is a very useful study tool for the student of orisha music.

This work is in constant progress, maintained by a single person. New information is to be added daily during my listening time, and the site is updated every now and then. If you would like to contribute information, visit the contributors page, which describes all the information that is missing from the database, as well as simple instructions on how to submit new data. For other information about this site, see the about page.

Please note that there is no guarantee as to the accuracy of the information contained in the database. If you find errors, please point it out to us.

At some point in the past, the author of these pages wrote some code and automatically converted some bata drumming notes from someone else into PDF format with musical notation. The PDF file can be found here.