Grooves · 130 BPM · 4/4 · straight · 12 bars · hard
The bossa nova groove on cajón
Quiet, even sixteenths with the accents on top. Restraint is the technique.
What you play
B bass · S snare · g ghost · restThe pulse4 bars · 1 written ×4
Sixteen even ghosts with a bass on 1 and 3. Dead flat, no accents anywhere. Get this boring before you put anything on top of it.
With the accents8 bars · 1 written ×8
Five snares laid over that pulse, unevenly spaced. Everything underneath stays exactly as quiet as it was - that is the part people get wrong.
How to play it
- 1Play The pulse for two full minutes and aim for dull: every bar the same, the bass on 1 and 3 marking the bar and nothing else standing out.
- 2Add the snares of With the accents one at a time, four bars with each before the next goes in, so you always know which one made the pulse lumpy.
- 3Climb five at a time, and go back down whenever the sixteenths start bunching rather than pushing on.
- 4Record about 90 seconds of With the accents in headphones.
Listen forA stream of sixteenths even enough to stop sounding like separate strokes, five snares sitting clearly on top of it, and no swell underneath when an accent goes by.
start 91 · pass 130 BPM · take about 90s
Record a take
I start the backing at 91 BPM, count one bar, and stop after about 90s. Phone about a metre away, facing the front plate. Headphones, or the microphone hears the backing as you. You get my notes within a minute of sending it.
Watch out for
- • The quiet strokes rising to meet the accents
- • Sixteenths bunching up in the back half of the bar
- • Playing the whole thing louder than the music has room for
Bossa nova on cajón: a flat sixteenth-note pulse with five accents laid over it. Quiet, even, and far harder than it sounds.
Bossa nova is the quietest thing in this collection and the one most likely to humble a player who arrived from rock. Nothing in it is loud, nothing is fast, and there is no room at all for an uneven hand.
Two layers
Underneath is a completely flat stream of sixteenth notes, even enough that a listener stops hearing individual strokes. Over the top sit five accents, unevenly spaced. Learn them separately and in that order, because the accents mean nothing if the bed under them is lumpy.
Why it is hard
Playing sixteen strokes a bar quietly and identically is a genuinely difficult motor skill. There is very little arm movement, so there is very little feedback about where each stroke landed. The unevenness is obvious from across the room and almost impossible to feel from behind the box.
This is the groove where recording yourself stops being a nice idea. Consistency is the entire skill and it is precisely what you cannot judge from the driver’s seat. Exercise 4-1 is the bare sixteenth-note stream, and it is where to start.
The exercise underneath it
4-1 - Sixteenth-note hands
Four taps per click, R-L-R-L, relaxed at slow speed.
Practise it with RafaRead about this
- Ghost notes: the quiet strokes that make a grooveThe near-silent taps between the loud notes, and why yours are probably too loud.
- How to get a clean snare sound on cajónThe crack at the top corner is your backbeat. Here is how to make it speak.
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