How to read cajón notation

You do not need to read music to play cajón, and most good cajón players learned by ear. But a written pattern is the fastest way to get a groove out of somebody else’s head and into your hands, and once you can read one, every exercise, method book and tab on the internet opens up.

There is no single standard for writing cajón. Books, teachers and websites all do it a little differently. The good news is that they all write down the same three things: which sound, when, and with which hand. Learn to read one system properly and the others take minutes.

The grid on this site

Every pattern here is drawn as a row of boxes, one box per slot in the bar. The count is written above each box, and inside it is the sound:

• B is a bass: full relaxed hand, centre of the front plate.
• S is a snare: fingers on the top corner, where the wires answer.
• g is a ghost: a quiet fingertip tap. It is drawn faint because it should sound faint.
• · a dot is a rest. Nothing happens there, but the time still passes.

Here is the groove most people mean when they say “the cajón beat”:

Read it left to right while counting out loud, and play whatever is under the word you are saying. “One” is a bass, “and” is a ghost, “two” is a snare, and so on. When you reach the end of the row, go straight back to the start without a gap. That is one bar, and a groove is that bar on repeat.

Counting: why the numbers matter more than the letters

The counts are the clock. In 4/4, the time almost all pop, rock and worship music is in, there are four beats in a bar, and those are the numbers. The metronome clicks on the numbers.

Halfway between two beats is the “and”, written &. A bar counted 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & has eight evenly spaced slots, and those slots are eighth notes. Say the count evenly, like a clock ticking twice as fast as the click, and the pattern falls into place.

Rests are where most misreading happens. A dot does not mean “skip ahead”. It means “wait exactly one slot”. Keep counting through it out loud, and the next stroke arrives on time. This is the half-time groove, which is mostly space:

Sixteenths: 1 e & a

Split every beat into four and you get sixteenth notes, counted 1 e & a 2 e & a (say “one ee and uh”). Sixteen slots in a bar of 4/4. On this site a sixteen-slot bar wraps onto two rows of eight, so the second row starts on beat 3.

This is where the letters under the boxes start to matter. R and L are your right and left hand. At sixteenths, which hand plays which stroke is the difference between a pattern that flows and one that ties your arms in a knot.

The rule that makes this easy: the right hand plays every number and every “&”, the left hand plays every “e” and every “a”. (Left-handers often flip it, and that is fine.) Once your hands move like that, any sixteenth pattern is just this one with some strokes turned into bass or snare.

6/8: six slots, two beats

Some songs do not count in four. 6/8 has six eighth notes in a bar, counted 1 2 3 4 5 6, and felt as two big beats, on 1 and on 4. If you tap your foot to a 6/8 song, your foot lands on 1 and 4.

The trap is to read it as six equal beats, which makes it plod. Count all six, but lean on 1 and 4. The 6/8 groove page plays it for you at any tempo.

The 12-beat compás

Flamenco forms like bulerías are written as a cycle of twelve beats, counted 1 to 12, with the accents spaced unevenly. Each box is one beat, and the grid wraps onto two rows of six.

Read the accents as groups: three, three, two, two, two. That is the shape you are learning, not twelve separate numbers. Flamenco players count the cycle so that it lands on 12, which is why the bass sits in the last box rather than the first. The bulerías page walks through it.

Text tabs

A lot of cajón patterns online are written as text, borrowed from drum tabs. Usually there is one line per sound and a row of counts along the top, with an x or a letter wherever that sound is played:

• a line for the snare with hits under 2 and 4,
• a line for the bass with hits under 1 and 3,
• sometimes a third line for ghosts, often left out entirely.

It is the same grid as above, turned on its side. Read down each column to see what happens on that count. The letters vary between sites, and some use different names for the same strokes, so always look for the key at the top before you trust a letter.

Staff notation in method books

Printed cajón books usually write on a five-line staff, like drum music. A few things to know:

• The lines are not pitches. A percussion clef (two short thick vertical bars) at the start tells you that each position on the staff stands for a sound, not a note. A key at the front of the book says which.
• Bass is written low, snare higher. Most books put the bass on a low line or space and the snare towards the middle, the way drum music puts the kick drum below the snare. Where exactly varies from book to book.
• Ghosts are marked as quieter. Often a smaller notehead, a note in brackets, or an x notehead. Again, the key decides.
• The rhythm is in the note shapes. A filled notehead with a stem is a quarter note, one beat in 4/4. One flag or one beam joining notes makes eighth notes, two per click. Two beams make sixteenths. Rests have their own symbols with the same values.
• Accents and hands sit outside the staff. A small > above a note means play it louder. R and L under the notes are the hands, exactly as on the grid.

The time signature at the start reads the same as anywhere else: 4/4 is four quarter notes per bar, 6/8 is six eighth notes. Once you see that a beam of eighths is just 1 & 2 &, a staff and a grid are two drawings of the same bar.

How to learn to read, rather than decode

Say every pattern out loud before you play it, sound and count together: “boom and crack and”. Then clap it. Then play it slowly against a click. Reading is a rhythm skill, not a visual one, and a pattern you can say is a pattern you can play. The five easy beats are a good set to practise on, because each one changes only one thing from the one before.