Ask four vihuela players what they strum and you will get one answer, because the answer is not theirs to choose. In this ensemble the strumming pattern belongs to the FORM: somebody calls a son de Jalisco, and the son’s mánico arrives with it, along with the meter, the bar grid and the harmony. That is what this engine models. Each cell below is indexed by the form that commands it, never by a name somebody liked.
THE SECOND THING THIS ENGINE MODELS IS UNISON. An armonía is two or three instruments — a vihuela, a guitar, in some regional line-ups a guitarra de golpe — playing the identical slot sequence at the identical instant. So a cell here is ONE pattern for the whole section rather than one per instrument, and that is a musical fact rather than a shortcut in the data shape. Precision is the entire virtue: a section whose hands disagree by a sixteenth stops being a rhythm instrument and becomes a smear.
THE VOCABULARY is four values and no more. down and up are full-hand strokes. muted is the braked slap — the hand lands on the strings and stops them, so the slot carries weight but no pitch. rest is declared silence, and a declared rest is as real a part of the bar as a stroke: a pattern that leaves its rests to be inferred has thrown away half of what it knows. Nothing else is a legal slot value.
WHAT IS DECLARED AND WHAT IS DERIVED. Only the bar length, the slot kinds, the accent convention (a downstroke and a slap are emphatic; an upstroke is connective) and the threshold at which a bar is said to carry a metric reading. Everything else on these pages — stroke counts, where the slaps fall, both readings of the twelve-slot bar, which forms share a cell — is computed, and scripts/validate-manicos.js recomputes all of it independently on every change.
None of the four instruments named across this site is ours to teach. The vihuela, the guitarrón and the guitar are Guitar Warrior’s families; the violin is Fiddle Warrior’s. What lives here is the layer none of them can write, because it only exists where several instruments have to agree.