A 15-minute cajón practice routine

Most people who own a cajón do not practise. They play. They sit down, run through the grooves they already know, and get up again, and a year later they are playing the same grooves the same way. Playing is lovely. Practice is different: it is a short, planned session that ends with you slightly better at one specific thing.

Here is a routine that fits in fifteen minutes, which is about how long most people actually have on a weeknight. It has four blocks, each one built on an exercise on this site, and it works whether you started last week or have been playing for years.

The routine

Minutes 0 to 3: the sounds

Start with one sound at a time, slowly, against a click. Bass for a minute, snare for a minute, then switch between them. Listen to each stroke rather than the pattern: is the bass a boom or a thud, does the snare crack, do your two hands sound the same?

This block is also your warm-up, so start quietly. The exercise is 1-4, boom meets crack: one bass, one snare, with space between them. If you are new, spend the whole block on 1-1 for the bass or 1-3 for the snare instead.

Minutes 3 to 6: time

Three minutes of nothing but steady time. Either quarter notes on the bass, sitting exactly on the click, which is exercise 2-1, or alternating eighth-note ghosts, right-left-right-left, which is exercise 2-2. Alternate between them day to day.

It is the dullest block and the one that pays the most. Everything you play later sits on top of this, and the aim is to make the click disappear underneath your stroke.

Minutes 6 to 12: the groove

Six minutes on the one groove you are working on this week. Not five grooves. One. Play it at a tempo where it is clean, for two minutes without stopping, then rest your hands for thirty seconds, then go again.

For most beginners that groove is exercise 3-1, boom, tick, crack, tick. Once it is solid, move to 3-2, which adds a second bass, and then to 3-3, the same groove held for two full minutes. The easy beats page has the order.

Minutes 12 to 15: a fill, then one recorded take

Three bars of groove, one bar of fill, landing back on 1. That is exercise 4-2, and the point is not the fill itself but coming out of it on time. Most players rush the fill and arrive at the next bar early.

Then record one take of the groove you worked on in block three. One take, not ten. That take is how you find out whether the session did anything, and over a few weeks it is how you see that this month is better than last month.

How to move it on week to week

Keep the four blocks the same and change what goes in them. A rough guide for your first two months:

• Weeks 1 and 2. Sounds: one at a time. Time: quarter-note bass at 60 to 70. Groove: the skeleton, bass and snare only. Skip the fill block and spend it on the groove.
• Weeks 3 and 4. Add the ghosts, so the groove block becomes the full groove. Time block moves to eighth-note ghosts.
• Weeks 5 and 6. Groove block becomes boom-boom crack. Start the fill block with sixteenth-note hands at a slow tempo before trying the fill.
• Weeks 7 and 8. The fill, and a two-minute groove. Swap one session a week for playing along with a whole song.

The tempo rule: two clean minutes at a tempo earns you five more beats per minute. If a new tempo falls apart, drop back ten and stay there. And move on when the recording says you are ready, not when you are bored, because boredom arrives a week before the skill does.

If you are coming back after a week or two off, do not pick up where you stopped. Start the groove block five or ten beats per minute slower than your last good take and climb back. It takes a session, not a week.

Drum rudiments on cajón

Drummers practise rudiments, short hand-to-hand patterns that build control. Three of them carry over to cajón directly, played as quiet ghosts on the corners of the plate.

Singles

Right, left, right, left, evenly. You already know this one: it is the engine under 2-2 and 4-1, and every groove with ghosts on it is a stream of singles with some strokes turned into bass or snare.

Doubles

Right, right, left, left. Two strokes with the same hand, even in volume and spacing. On cajón it is the control you need for a double bass that does not gallop, and for fills where one hand has to play twice in a row.

The paradiddle

Right, left, right, right, then left, right, left, left. Two singles and a double, and because the double swaps which hand leads, each group starts on the opposite hand. Put a snare on the first stroke of each group and ghosts on the rest, and you have a pattern where the accent moves from hand to hand, which is the skill behind the traveling accent.

Play rudiments slowly, against a click, with the same rules as everything else: relaxed hands, every stroke bouncing off, and no faster than you can keep them even. A minute or two in the time block is plenty. They are seasoning, not the meal.

What to leave out

New grooves every night, playing at your top speed, and long sessions you cannot keep up. A routine you do five nights a week for fifteen minutes will take you further than a perfect hour-long plan you do once. If your hands are sore, shorten the session and play quieter, and read why cajón hands hurt.