Grooves · 72 BPM · 4/4 · straight · 16 bars · easy

The half-time groove on cajón

One backbeat instead of two. The hardest easy groove there is.

What you play

B bass · S snare · g ghost · rest

The half-time bar8 bars · 1 written ×8

Bass on 1, snare on 3, and nothing else anybody is meant to notice. The bar takes twice as long to come round as it feels like it should, and that is the whole point.

With a lift8 bars · 1 written ×8

One extra bass just before the snare. Use it for a chorus and go straight back to the plain bar afterwards, or it stops meaning anything.

50 BPM

startpass

How to play it

1Play The half-time bar and count 2 and 4 out loud without playing them, so the empty beats belong to you rather than being something you wait through.
2Loop it eight bars at a time and add nothing, until you can go a whole loop without reaching for a fill.
3Work up five at a time, then use With a lift for one chorus only and come straight back, so the extra bass keeps meaning something.
4Record about 90 seconds of The half-time bar in headphones.

Listen forOne snare a bar on 3, no louder than a backbeat on 2 and 4 would be, ghosts you can barely hear, and the same tempo at the end of the take as at the start.

start 50 · pass 72 BPM · take about 90s

Record a take

I start the backing at 50 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 tempo climbing as the song goes on
• The lone snare hit like an announcement rather than a backbeat
• Filling the gaps because they feel too long

How to play a slow song on cajón without filling it up: one snare on 3 instead of two, and the discipline to leave the rest alone.

Half-time is what you play when a song is slow and you want it to stay that way. Instead of a snare on 2 and 4 there is one snare, on 3. The bar takes twice as long to come round and everything in it gets room to breathe.

It is the easiest groove on this site to play and the hardest to play well, because slow tempos are uncomfortable and the natural response to discomfort is to fill them.

The discipline

At 70 BPM there is the better part of a second between strokes. That gap feels like a mistake you ought to be correcting. It is not. Every fill you add makes the song smaller, and the players around you lose the space they were counting on.

If you cannot stand the silence, put the ghosts in and keep them genuinely inaudible. They give your hands something to do without anybody hearing you do it, which is exactly what they are for.

Where it goes wrong

Speeding up. Slow is where drift shows most, and an unaccompanied player who starts at 70 is routinely at 78 by the last chorus with no idea it happened. It is also the easiest thing on this site to measure, so record a take before you trust yourself on it.

The other one is hitting the snare on 3 too hard because it is the only one in the bar. It still wants to be a backbeat, not an announcement. Exercise 5-3 is this groove with a take you can record.

The exercise underneath it

5-3 - Half-time chill

Space and patience: the laid-back singer-songwriter groove.

Practise it with Rafa

Read 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.
Your first cajón grooveOne bar that fits half the songs you already know, step by step.