What is a cajón?
A cajón is a wooden box you sit on and play with your bare hands. What it is made of, the three sounds it makes, and where it came from.
· 5 min read · Rafa, your cajón coach
A cajón is a wooden box you sit on and hit with your bare hands. That is the whole instrument. No sticks, no stand, no tuning key, nothing to plug in. You sit down, and the thing you are sitting on is the drum.
It is pronounced ka-HON. The word is just Spanish for “box”, which tells you most of what you need to know about how it started.
What the box is made of
Four parts do all the work, and knowing which is which will save you a lot of guessing about why your box sounds the way it does.
- The front plate. The thin sheet of plywood you actually strike, called the tapa. It is screwed down tight at the corners and left free in the middle, which is why the centre booms and the top corners crack.
- The body. Thicker wood, sealed on five sides. This is the air chamber, and it is the reason a bass note has anywhere to go.
- The sound hole. Round, cut in the back panel. Point it away from a wall or you smother your own bass.
- The wires. Snare wires or guitar strings stretched against the inside of the front plate, up near the top. They are what turn a knock into a crack.
Three sounds, and that is the lot
Where your hand lands decides which sound you get. There are three worth naming, and a whole career is built out of them.
- Bass. Full relaxed hand, dead centre, roughly a hand-width below the top edge. Bounce straight off. You get a deep round boom.
- Snare. Fingers together, striking the top corner so the wires behind the plate answer. Sharp, bright, and it is your backbeat.
- Ghost. Fingertips, barely any weight, near the corners. Quiet enough that a listener feels it rather than hears it. This is the sound that makes the other two sound like music instead of a metronome.
If you take one thing from this page, take that list. Everything else you will ever play on this instrument is those three sounds in a different order.
Where it came from
The first cajones were built on the Peruvian coast by enslaved Africans, out of the shipping crates they were made to work with, at a time when their own drums were banned. An instrument that looks like furniture is an instrument nobody confiscates.
It stayed a Peruvian instrument for most of two centuries. Then in 1977 the flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucía heard one at a party in Lima, bought it, and took it home. His percussionist Rubem Dantas carried it into flamenco, and within a decade it had replaced half the hand percussion in Spain. It has been spreading ever since.
Why so many people end up owning one
It is the only drum you can carry under one arm, sit down on, and play at a volume that does not get you thrown out of the room. That is why you find it behind acoustic guitarists, in worship bands, at campfires, in flamenco, in Peruvian festejo, and on half the unplugged sessions recorded in the last thirty years.
It is also the reason so many people who own one have never had a lesson. A cajón makes a decent noise within a minute of sitting on it, so nobody feels they need teaching, and then two years later they are still playing the same bar.
What your first week actually looks like
Not grooves. Grooves come in week two. The first week is one sound at a time, played slowly against a click, until each one comes out the same every time. That is what the method starts with, and it is forty-five seconds a go.