If you’re a drummer branching out into playing the cajón, learning to convert grooves you already know on the kit is the quickest way to get started. Since all cajóns can produce bass sounds and most have internal wires that can imitate a snare, the cajón is well-suited to copy the sounds of a drum kit. A great starting point is to take standard rock beats and other patterns and adapt them to your new instrument.
The Beginner’s Approach
We’ll approach this from a complete beginner’s perspective and use just a few basic components: the snare tone, bass tone, and touches to imitate drum set sounds on the cajón. There’s a variety of ways to do this, some simpler than others. Many of these techniques use hand to hand R L R L patterns, but as you will see, that’s not always the case.
The snare tone is obtained by slapping near the top of the tapa, or the playing surface, with your fingers. This will vibrate the strings or wires inside the box. You won’t need to hit your drum very hard to get a good snare sound, so don’t overdo it. The bass note is played with the center of your palm a little further down the surface, imitating the bass drum. You can add light touches with your fingertips between the louder hits, emulating hi-hat notes and creating more energetic patterns.
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The Common Rock Groove
Let’s begin by taking a common eighth-note rock groove (Ex. 1). The easiest way to play this type of groove on the cajón is to ignore the hi-hat notes and tap out the skeleton snare and kick pattern (Ex. 2). This is the quickest way to get some grooves happening. Eventually, you’ll probably want to add softer touches between the bass notes and snare tones on your cajón to flesh out the groove more (Ex. 3). At very slow tempos, you may want to add sixteenth-note touches between the bass and snare pattern instead of eighth-notes.
Let’s try that same approach to create a shuffle pattern on the cajón. Example 4 uses the same simple kick and snare pattern as in the first pattern, but this time in a triplet rhythm that’s played as a shuffle. To adapt it to the cajón, we’ll add light touches on the last part of each triplet to create the shuffle. These touches make a huge difference to our groove, resulting in a busier pattern that’s more interesting than the underlying bass and snare framework (Ex. 5). Remember, there are many degrees of shuffle between eighth-notes and eighth-note triplets, so explore those middle ranges too. Sometimes just a hint of a shuffle is all your groove needs to feel great. Another option is to fill in the groove by playing all the triplet parts for a bluesy feel, which also helps maintain the groove’s energy when playing at slower tempos (Ex. 6).
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Syncopation and the Cajón
Funky rock drum set grooves also translate well to the cajón. Example 7 is a typical rock beat that you might want to transfer to the cajón when backing up an acoustic guitarist. For this adaptation, we won’t fill all of the spaces with touches, but instead only reinforce the important notes. Leaving spaces after the main notes creates a syncopated feel that still breathes a bit and doesn’t feel cluttered (Ex. 8). However, when converting sixteenth-note patterns, you may want to fill all of the spaces with touches to duplicate the original beat’s insistent drive (Ex. 9 and 10).
For this last example, we’ll convert a samba drum set groove. This instance demonstrates another approach to adapting grooves from one instrument to another. You don’t always have to play hand to hand patterns on the cajón, but you can use each hand independently of the other. In this groove, one hand will play the bass while the other plays the snare part. You may find it easier to have your non-dominant hand play the bass part, because it repeats on every beat, while using your dominant hand to play the trickier snare rhythm.
It’s easy to expand these basic ideas into a wide variety of patterns. I hope this helps you get started creating your own intriguing grooves on the cajón.
Cajóns