Grooves · 150 BPM · 3/4 · straight · 16 bars · easy
The waltz on cajón
Three beats, one heavy and two light. Counting in fours will not work here.
What you play
B bass · S snare · g ghost · restThe waltz bar8 bars · 1 written ×8
Bass on 1, and the two snares after it noticeably lighter. If all three land at the same volume you have a march, and nobody can dance to a march in three.
Stripped back8 bars · 1 written ×8
Ghosts out, three strokes to the bar. This is the version that fits under a singer, and most of the time it is the one to play.
How to play it
- 1Start on Stripped back , three strokes to the bar, and settle the three-beat metre before you give your hands anything else to do.
- 2Move to The waltz bar and keep the two snares under the bass, so 1 is still obviously the heaviest stroke with the ghosts in.
- 3Take it up in steps of ten, counting out loud the whole way, and play sixteen bars at each speed before you move on.
- 4Record about 90 seconds of The waltz bar in headphones.
Listen forThree beats to the bar with 1 clearly the heaviest, the two snares matched and lighter, and the accent on the same beat in the last bar as in the first.
start 105 · pass 150 BPM · take about 90s
Record a take
I start the backing at 105 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
- • All three beats at the same weight, which turns a waltz into a march
- • The bar quietly regrouping itself into fours or sixes
- • The tempo rising once the metre stops feeling strange
Three beats to a bar instead of four: one heavy, two light. How to play a waltz on cajón without it turning into a march.
A waltz has three beats in a bar, not four. That sounds like a small change and it is not: your hands have spent their whole life expecting a backbeat on 2 and 4, and in 3/4 there is nowhere to put one.
Count out loud before you play. ONE two three, ONE two three. One is heavy and the other two are light, and that weighting is the entire difference between a waltz and three quarter notes in a row.
The trap
Two bars of 3/4 feel a lot like one bar of 6/8, and a player counting in fours will quietly regroup the beats until the bar lands somewhere it should not. The tell is that your accent starts sliding onto a different beat each time round. When that happens, stop and count out loud again; there is no fixing it with your hands.
Where you will meet it
Folk songs, country ballads, a lot of Irish and central European music, and a scattering of pop songs that reach for 3/4 precisely because it feels different. It is worth having and it takes an evening.
If your time wanders as soon as the pattern is unfamiliar, that is an endurance problem rather than a metre problem. Exercise 2-1 is two minutes of nothing but holding a tempo, and it is the honest fix.
The exercise underneath it
2-1 - Two minutes, zero drift
Endurance and metronome lock on quarter-note bass.
Practise it with RafaRead about this
- How to play cajónThe whole instrument on one page, in the order that actually works.
- How to practise cajón with a metronomeHow to use a click so it makes you better instead of making you miserable.
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