Two halves of three, and a declared rest inside the first one. The hole is the interesting part: this is the only cell in the set that stops, and it stops in the place where, in the music this comes from, something else is playing. A gaita rhythm section is a crowded room — tambora, charrasca, furro — and the cuatro leaves room in the bar rather than filling it.
The bar, slot by slot
Six slots, written out as D-·-U-D-U-F. The "sounds" column is computed from this instrument's real open strings with the library's first D major grip under the hand, in the order a stroke actually reaches them — nothing in this table is typed by hand:
| Slot | Stroke | Sounds | Strings |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | down | D D F# D | 4 |
| 2 | rest | — | — |
| 3 | up | D F# D D | 4 |
| 4 | down | D D F# D | 4 |
| 5 | up | D F# D D | 4 |
| 6 | frenado | braked | — |
The bar holds 2 down, 2 up, 1 frenado, 1 rest, with the brake on slot 6 of 6; measured against both counts it carries the six reading (three 1/3, six 2/2).
Notice what the sounds column does and does not say. Every struck slot puts the same four notes into the air, because the grip has not moved; what changes is the order the hand reaches them, and on this tuning that order is not the order the pitches climb in. The top note arrives before the hand runs out of strings, which is why a strum here lands as one block rather than a spread.
A bar in six
Against the count of two beats of three, both beats land on an emphatic stroke and the bar carries the reading outright. Against the waltz count only one of three beats does, and the reading collapses. So this cell is the mirror of the vals: it commits just as hard, in the opposite direction.
Note that the rest is not what makes it a six. The rest sits inside the first half, off the beat; what makes the bar read in six is where the downstrokes are. Silence shapes a pattern, but accent placement is what a listener counts by.
Getting it to sit
Rests are harder than strokes because a hand in motion wants to keep moving. Say the rest out loud while you play the bar — actually say it — until the gap stops feeling like a stumble and starts feeling like a slot you are choosing to leave empty. The commonest fault here is filling it with a ghosted upstroke you never decided to play.
Once the hole is stable, work on the brake that closes the bar so that it is a brake and not merely a quiet stroke. Two things distinguish them: the brake happens on the string with the hand already stopping, and it has no pitch at all. If you can hear the chord in it, the hand is arriving late. Build both against the metronome before adding any speed.
Where it sits
All three cells run over the same grips, so the four-string chord library is the other half of this page, and the key pages show which changes the repertoire actually leans on. If you have arrived here from the ten-string side of the site, the comparison page is the one that explains why none of this transfers.