Grooves · 95 BPM · 4/4 · straight · 12 bars · easy

The reggaetón groove on cajón

Dembow is 3-3-2 with a backbeat on top. Two strokes and you are in.

What you play

B bass · S snare · g ghost · rest

The 3-3-2 skeleton4 bars · 1 written ×4

Bass on 1, the and of 2, and 4. Nothing else. Play it until the uneven spacing feels normal, because everything else sits on top of it.

The full groove8 bars · 1 written ×8

Same three basses, with a snare on 2 and 4 holding the room together and ghosts filling the rest. The snare is what makes it danceable.

67 BPM

startpass

How to play it

1Play The 3-3-2 skeleton and give all three basses the same weight, so the unevenness lives in the spacing and not in the volume.
2Add the snare on 2 and 4 without letting the basses shrink, then the ghosts last.
3Hold it with the ghosts near silent. If all eight eighths arrive at the same size, the low end has stopped being the hook.
4Record about 90 seconds of The full groove in headphones.

Listen forThree round, evenly weighted basses on 1, the & of 2 and 4, a bright snare on 2 and 4, ghosts you can barely hear, and no drift in the tempo.

start 67 · pass 95 BPM · take about 90s

Record a take

I start the backing at 67 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

• Polite basses, which leaves the groove with no low end to dance to
• The middle bass sliding onto 3 and squaring the skeleton up
• Ghosts creeping up to snare volume

Reggaetón on cajón: the dembow rhythm is a 3-3-2 skeleton. Learn the skeleton, add the backbeat, and it plays itself.

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.

The exercise underneath it

5-1 - Tresillo - the Latin key

The 3-3-2 rhythm underneath reggaetón, rumba, and half of Latin music.

Practise it with Rafa

Read about this

The rumba pattern on cajónThe flamenco groove, built up from the 3-3-2 skeleton underneath it.
Your first cajón grooveOne bar that fits half the songs you already know, step by step.