The reggaetón groove on cajón

Reggaetón sounds like it should be complicated and it is two ideas stacked. Underneath every record in the genre is one rhythm, called dembow, and underneath dembow is the 3-3-2 you already know if you have played any Latin music at all.

Count eight eighths and put a bass on the first, the fourth and the seventh. Three, three, two. That is the entire skeleton, and the first section above is nothing but that, so you can hear how much of the genre is already present before anything else happens.

Adding the part people dance to

Put a snare on 2 and 4 and fill the gaps with ghosts. That is it. The tension between the uneven basses and the even backbeat is the whole feel, and it is why the groove works at walking pace where most grooves need speed to sound like anything.

The mistake

Playing the basses too politely. In reggaetón the low end is the hook, so the three basses want to be genuinely loud and genuinely round, and the ghosts want to almost disappear. If your bass tone is a knock rather than a boom this groove will expose it immediately, which makes it a good diagnostic and a frustrating first groove. There is a fix for that in how to get a deep bass tone.

Exercise 5-1 is the 3-3-2 on its own with a recorded take, which is the fastest way to find out whether your skeleton is actually even.