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The cow-horn trumpet the Maroons used to carry signals across the hills — a coded instrument as much as a musical one, able to send messages British forces could not read. It is still blown at Accompong, and it is one of the oldest continuously used instruments in Jamaica.

The lead drum of the Rasta drum family — the smallest of the three nyabinghi drums, played with the fingers and carrying the improvised line over the funde's steady heartbeat and the bass drum's foundation. Count Ossie brought it into the recording studio, and its phrasing echoes through reggae drumming.

The banjo is the instrument that gives mento its bite. Played rhythmically rather than picked in the American bluegrass manner, it sits with the guitar, hand drum, rhumba box and often a bamboo saxophone in the standard mento line-up — the sound Jamaican popular music came from before ska turned towards American radio.

In Jamaican music the electric bass is the lead voice: the melodic, repeating figure that identifies a rhythm — often the only part a listener needs to name it. Aston "Family Man" Barrett, Robbie Shakespeare, Lloyd Parks and Errol "Flabba" Holt built the canon, and dub exists to make the instrument enormous.

A small consumer keyboard sold from the early 1980s, and the most consequential piece of equipment in dancehall's history. One of its preset accompaniment patterns — slowed down and reworked by Noel Davey — became the rhythm of Wayne Smith's "Under Mi Sleng Teng", produced by King Jammy in 1985. A machine intended for living rooms replaced the session band, and the music has been made on keyboards ever since.

The cane or bamboo fife that carries the melody in Jonkonnu and other Jamaican folk music, over the rattling drum and bass drum. It belongs to a tradition that predates recorded Jamaican music entirely, and its phrasing survives in mento and in the melodic instincts of what came after.

The middle drum of the Nyabinghi three: the funde holds the steady two-beat heartbeat — the pulse the tradition calls "do good" — between the bass drum's foundation and the repeater's improvisation. It is the discipline of the ensemble, and its steadiness passed into reggae's feel.

The tonewheel organ behind a huge share of classic Jamaican records. Jackie Mittoo at Studio One and Winston Wright at Treasure Isle built ska and rocksteady arrangements on it, and in reggae it supplies the percolating "bubble" that shadows the rhythm. Foundation riddims such as "Real Rock" and "Hot Milk" are organ tunes.

The brass front line — trumpet, trombone, tenor — that ska made a lead instrument and Alpha Boys School staffed: Drummond, McCook, Moore and their successors. Rocksteady thinned it, reggae arranged around it, and the digital era largely replaced it, which is why a live horn section still signals occasion in Jamaican music.

Name used for the Rastafari hand drums — the akete family played in Nyabinghi worship, bass, funde and repeater — carried from Burru drumming into the faith's music and, through Count Ossie's camp, into the recorded mainstream of Jamaican music.

The plastic schoolroom mouth-organ keyboard that Augustus Pablo made a serious instrument: from "Java" (1972) through King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown, its reedy minor-key wail became the sound of deep 1970s dub — a toy elevated by one player's conviction.

The largest of the three Nyabinghi drums, struck with a padded beater to carry the ceremony's deep foundational pulse under the funde's steady heartbeat and the repeater's improvisation. Its boom is the sound Rastafari brought into the studio through Count Ossie, and reggae's one drop keeps its accent.

The lead drum of the Nyabinghi ensemble — the smallest and highest of the three, and the improviser: over the bass drum's foundation and the funde's steady heartbeat, the repeater speaks, accents and answers. Count Ossie was its most influential master; its syncopations echo through reggae drumming.

The mento band's bass: a large lamellophone descended from the African mbira family, its metal tongues plucked over a sound hole while the player sits on the box. It anchored mento groups before amplification reached the countryside, and revival bands still build and play them.

Stamped-bamboo percussion — lengths of bamboo pounded and struck in ensemble — best documented in Trinidad's pre-steelpan carnival but part of the wider Afro-Caribbean vocabulary of found-material music-making that in Jamaica runs through Jonkonnu fife-and-drum and mento's bamboo instruments.