Questions about learning cajón

Mostly, yes. You can learn the three sounds and a groove from a page like this one. What you cannot do alone is hear your own time, because your ears are busy playing, so the thing you most need feedback on is the one thing you cannot give yourself. That gap is what a recorded take closes: you play, and somebody who was only listening tells you what happened.

No. Rafa is an AI coach. He listens to the audio of every take you record, reads the millisecond measurements taken from it, and teaches from one fixed method of 21 exercises. Nobody is sitting on the other end listening to your playing.

No. Every exercise is shown as a grid of the three sounds with the count written above it, and you can hear the pattern played back at any tempo before you try it. Nothing on this site requires notation.

A clean bass tone takes a couple of sessions. Three sounds you can produce on demand takes about two weeks of ten minutes a day. A groove a guitarist is happy to play over takes a month or two. Playing along to a record without drifting takes longer, and it is the part most self-taught players never quite reach alone.

A cajón and a phone. Prop the phone against something a metre or so away and record. There is no app to install, no interface, no microphone to buy, and no settings to learn.

No. All 21 exercises, the recorded takes and the feedback are free to use, and you can start without creating an account.

Not to start. You can record a take and get feedback on it straight away. An account only matters once you want your history kept, so that this month can be compared with last month, and you can add an email later without losing anything you already recorded.

Bass, snare and ghost. Bass is a full relaxed hand in the centre of the front plate. Snare is fingers on the top corner, where the wires behind the plate answer. Ghost is a very quiet fingertip tap that sets the floor the other two speak from.

Usually not. A thin bass is nearly always the hand staying on the plate instead of bouncing off, striking too high so the snare wires mix in, or hitting too hard with a stiff arm. All three are fixable in one session, and expensive boxes thud just as readily as cheap ones when the technique is wrong.

Ten to twenty minutes on most days beats two hours once a week. Hands learn on a schedule and there is no way to cram it. A realistic evening is a couple of minutes on one sound slowly, five minutes on the pattern you are working on, and one recorded take.

Quietly, yes, and it is better practice than it sounds. Playing at low volume forces the contrast between your ghost strokes and your snare to be real rather than brute force, which is the exact skill that makes a groove sit. Put the box on a rug and keep the sound hole away from a shared wall.

They are stored privately against your account and are used to give you feedback and to compare one take with the next. They are not public, and nobody else can play them back.

Level 1, and it will take you an evening rather than a fortnight. Experienced self-taught players almost always have something small and permanent hiding in the basics, most often ghost strokes that are far too loud or a snare that arrives early. Better to find it in an evening than to build another year on top of it.