The cajon’s place in music is both popular and diverse. From the mountains of Peru to the islands of the Caribbean, boxes have been used to substitute other drums for hundreds of years. What’s most exciting is how adaptable this instrument is to most popular settings.
The cajon is a box drum played with hands and other implements. Basic strokes include the bass tone, high tone, slap, and touch. Although techniques may vary from one player to another, the goal is to produce the best high and low sounds with quieter strokes filling out the groove.
It’s important to develop technique that produces good basic sounds without limiting yourself to these few. For example, you can change the pitch by moving the heel of your foot across the face of the cajon. Additionally, you can use brushes and other implements to strike the cajon.
Playing cajon is not only a lot of fun, it’s a versatile instrument. It can be used in both popular and traditional musical settings. This article shares an introduction to both.
The Parts of a Cajon
A cajon is comprised of a face (or tapa), snares (usually inside), shell, and sound hole.
- The face is the thinnest part of the drum because it’s where the main striking areas are found.
- The shell is well constructed because it needs to support the weight of the player sitting on it.
- The sound hole is in the back and lets the air escape, effectively providing some movement of air to improve the tone.
- Most cajons these days have snares. Some of which can be adjusted easily with a lever. The snares add a little rattle to the sound, which helps keep the instrument excited in the mix of other sounds.
Posture and Playing Areas
The alignment of your back with your shoulders and hips is generally not the first concern of a beginner cajon player. Attention to your ergonomics, however, will make a huge difference in your ability to play the instrument well and last through extended performances.
Sit on the back two thirds of the cajon with your feet flat on the ground. You’ll need to bend forward enough to reach the playing area, so keep your back straight. This helps to support the movements your hands and arms are making as you play the cajon.
Focus most of your playing on the top third or so of the cajon face. As explained below, the basic strokes are played in specific areas to create the desired sounds.
What are the Basic Strokes?
The bass stroke produces the low sound when you play cajon, and the high tone stroke produces the higher frequency sound. As a drum set player, I tend to think about the bass stroke as the kick and the high tone stroke as the snare.
The strokes I focus on are the bass, high tone, and touch. Coming from a drum set player’s perspective, I think of the bass stroke as the kick drum, the high tone as the snare, and the touches as the cymbals and inner beats that thicken the groove.
Each stroke is achieved by playing the cajon with more or less of your hand in different areas of the drum. As you learn these strokes, move your hand around the cajon to experiment with what sounds best. Also, avoid hitting it too hard because it can only be so loud. Beyond a certain volume may distort the quality of sound.
Bass Stroke
Position your hand so that almost all of it is on the face of the cajon. Depending on your hand and your drum, you may have a little bit of your lower palm (closest to your wrist) not touching the face of the cajon.
This stroke is a wrist and arm movement. Make sure that you remove your hand from the drum after striking so that it can resonate, producing a full bass tone.
Slap Stroke
The slap is produced when the middle of your palm contacts the drum and your relaxed fingers continue forward to make the slapping sound. It takes time to develop the right hand placement and relaxation of the fingers, so be patient.
Try practicing this technique on the edge of a table. Focus on the fingers striking as a result of being relaxed enough to continue because the palm has already stopped.
If you play congas and have mastered the slap on that instrument, this one is very similar. Just remember that a cajon doesn’t do as well with the kind of force you can exert onto a conga.
High Tone Stroke
This stroke is like a slap in terms of the sound it produces, but the technique is more simple. Play the upper face of the cajon with three fingers, just below the knuckles.
Strike the cajon with your fingers straight and rigid so they don’t stay on the face after the stroke. After striking the drum, relax your fingers immediately to let your muscles relax. Training yourself to relax like this is key to the longevity of your playing and overall muscle health.
The exact placement of your fingers can vary from one individual to another, and it can be different on various drums. So, try different placements to find the tone best sounding tone.
Press (or Muted) Tone Stroke
Think of a press tone as a high tone but you leave you fingers on the cajon. This gives the tone a muted character that can stand out in combinations of other tones.
Touch Stroke
Also called grace notes or ghost notes, these strokes are light and felt more than they are heard.They are timekeeping strokes that add a thickness to your cajon groove that let’s the other tones fall into place smoothly.
Touch strokes are played with slightly different techniques among professional cajon players. Some players seem to approach the instrument with more finger techniques you may find in Asian hand drumming, while others approach technique with a more Afro-Cuban or Peruvian style. Regardless of the technique, the goal of the touch stroke still remains the same.
The touch is with fingers. It’s light and can be its own stroke or incorporated into other stroke techniques. For example, some cajon players will combine the high tone and touch stroke by leaving the upper palm (near the fingers) on the top edge of the cajon and use only fingers to execute the touch stroke. These players are often developing their technique to support fingers rolls.
Exercises
The first set of exercises are designed to coordinate your hands with the different sounds in a simple pattern. If these exercises are practiced consistently, you will find it easier to improvise and play more complicated beats.
Play these exercises at slow, medium, and fast tempos without overdoing it. If you want more information about using metronomes for practice, this article has 4 ways to use a metronome for the best results.
Lastly, the exercises below are written with right-hand lead. You may start with either left or right, but it’s important to start exercises with both hands (not at the same time, of course) to balance your hand development.
Exercise 1
This exercise is designed to help you focus on the quality of your bass strokes and high tone strokes. Listen to them and watch your technique. Make adjustments as necessary to make good sounds.
Exercise 2
Like Exercise 1, this one is about focusing on the quality of your tones. The difference here is how the strokes are doubled for each type. The exercise is hand to hand, so listen to how even your hands sound while playing the same type of stroke.
Exercise 3
Now it’s time to add ghost notes. These touch strokes are played at a lower dynamic (volume) than the bass or high tones. Listen for the difference and remember to play these ghost notes relaxed — they should be felt more than heard.
Exercise 4
The next series of exercises focus on triplet subdivisions. The downbeat accents are played on the high tones and bass tones, filling in with ghost notes. Notice that the progression of the exercises adds a bass tone to beat one, three, and eventually all four beats..
Exercise 5
This is an exercise that I borrowed from developing conga technique. It’s purpose is to coordinate the movement of bass to touch strokes in the left (or right hand) while playing in between those strokes with four different types of strokes with the right hand.
Exercise Variations
All of these exercises can be changed in simple ways. You can shift the entire pattern an 8th, 16th, or triplet, depending on what’s most appropriate for the rhythm. For example, if you shift the first pattern in Exercise 3 to the left on 8th note, you get the pattern below.
Simple Rock Patterns
If we think of the bass stroke as the bass drum and the slap as the snare drum, almost any rock beat played on drum set can beat adapted for the cajon. The trick is to use the potential of the cajon to support the groove in a similar way as the drum set would.
Boom Wack
This is the most common beat and often the first one drum set players learn. On cajon, like on drum set, it’s not to be taken for granted. It’s an easy concept of low to high sounds repeated over and over, but it takes more effort to make it feel good with the groove.
Boom Boom Smack
Like the “Boom Wack,” this beat concept is also simple — it’s “We Will Rock You.” Playing it on the cajon is just as powerful if your sounds are clear and full.
Boom Chick Boom Boom
Also called the samba kick pattern, you’ll hear this pattern all over popular music. It keeps the groove moving forward, and it’s easy to come with variations that work well with different musical phrases.
Try this groove with a shaker or brush in one hand.
Variations
The cajon is a simple instrument by design. In practice, it has many possibilities in terms of rhythms for patterns or fills. To make your grooves more interesting and fit with the song form, take advantage of variations.
Start with one of the rock grooves above. Try moving the bass tone over one eighth note (or sixteenth). Avoid changing too much at once because you can easily lose clarity.
The examples below are variations that explore the concepts of shifting, adding, or subtracting from the “Simple Rock Patterns.” If you are having coordination issues and your patterns sound messy, refer back to the exercises to further develop your hands.
Funk Patterns
The funk groove lives in the interaction of downbeats and syncopation. Add some well-placed space, and you have the beginnings of funk.
It’s important to play with even hands in order to give each type of stroke, particularly the touches, the attention they deserve. Focus on the second exercise in the section earlier in this article. In particular, your left hand needs to be consistent for the grooves to feel good.
Groove along to your favorite song with a funky feel.
Syncopating the Bass
The bass tone is mostly on syncopated beats of these grooves. Make your own variations by adding double bass tones or leaving out some of the tones notated in the examples below.
Syncopating the High Tone (or Slap)
As mentioned above, try new variations on these grooves by removing bass tones or high tones. Listen to the groove and consider the phrase changing with more space, more hits, or a little of both.
Combinations of Slap and Bass Syncopation
This groove focuses on adding doubles to the bass and high tones. Like the other examples, these can be varied to come up with new grooves.
Shuffles and 6/8 Patterns
Adapting a drum set groove like the shuffle can be difficult. Make sure you’re strong on the feel of the groove because the cajon will leave you more exposed than playing drum set.
Try different pattern variations by leaving out eighth notes that are not as crucial to establishing the feel and style. For example, leave out the upbeat of beat one and the three on the blues shuffle. This would be particularly helpful when tempos get fast or if you play a shaker or tambourine, too.
Blues Shuffle
Pop / Rock Shuffle
Traditional Patterns (Peruvian)
The music that developed in Cuba among African slaves highly influenced Afro-Peruvian music. Although it includes different rhythmic styles than Cuba, you’ll see similar instrumentation, dance, and adaptation of European songs forms for African rhythmic aesthetics.
Play these styles with the African bell pattern (shown below). Sometimes I find videos on YouTube with different bell patterns that accompany the drums.
Festejo
This style is fast, and the last two eighths are left out. This leaves room for improvisation.
The dance and drums are highly interactive . Like the Cuban rumba, the dance and drum improvisation complement and, at times, mimic one another.
Zamacueca
This is more of a medium tempo groove.
Lando
The lando pattern is the slowest of the three examples. The phrase accents the second bass tone on beat two in the example below.
Final Thoughts
The cajon is a versatile instrument because of its size and simplicity. You can play rhythms that add color to a groove or become the main time-keeper in the group. It has a rich history of being used for improvisation and accompaniment of song and dance.
These drums are affordable and available from a lot of the main percussion manufacturing brands, like Meinl and Latin Percussion.
I play the cajon a lot to accompany acoustic guitars and vocals on pop / rock gigs. It can easily fit onto small stages and doesn’t overwhelm the group’s instrumentation. Add a shaker, bongo, cowbell, and a small cymbal, and the set is ready to phrase a whole gig’s worth of interesting grooves.