Songs · 150 BPM · 4/4 · straight · 30 bars · moderate

How to play La Bamba on cajón

Fast, relentless, and a stamina test. The son jarocho pulse from Veracruz.

What you play

B bass · S snare · g ghost · rest

Intro4 bars · 1 written ×4

Bass and snare only, no ghosts, so the tempo is unmistakable before the singing starts. Four bars.

Main groove16 bars · 2 written ×8

A two-bar cycle: the first bar sits, the second pushes with an extra bass on the and of 3. Alternating them is what stops it sounding like a drum machine.

bar 1

bar 2 · push

Break2 bars · 1 written ×2

Everything drops to ghosts except the downbeat. Two bars. This is where the room notices you, and it works because of how loud everything around it was.

Final chorus8 bars · 1 written ×8

The push bar, every bar, all the way to the end. This is the only place in the arrangement where relentless is the right answer.

105 BPM

startpass

How to play it

1Loop Main groove and say 'sit, push' across the two bars until you never play them the wrong way round.
2Play the end of Main groove straight into the Break, over and over. The drop is the part that goes wrong, not the quiet bars themselves.
3Come out of the Break into Final chorus at the tempo you left. A quiet passage is where a player speeds up to make up for the space.
4Play it end to end once before you record. If you cannot finish it, drop ten and finish that instead, because a take that stops early teaches nothing.
5Record the whole arrangement in headphones, about 50 seconds.

Listen forThe two bars of Main groove clearly different from each other, a Break far quieter than everything around it, and 150 holding from the Intro to the last stroke.

start 105 · pass 150 BPM · take about 48s

Record a take

I start the backing at 105 BPM, count one bar, and stop after about 48s. 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

• Playing Main groove as a one-bar loop
• A Break at half volume, which reads as a mistake rather than an arrangement
• Speeding up through Final chorus
• Tension in the arm ending the take before the song does

A full cajón part for the traditional La Bamba: the driving son jarocho pulse at 150 BPM, the two-bar cycle, and how to last the whole song.

La Bamba is a son jarocho from Veracruz and it has been played at parties for a very long time. On cajón it is mostly a stamina problem: the groove itself is not hard, and holding it at 150 for three minutes without stiffening up is.

The two-bar cycle

The main section is two bars, not one. The first sits on the beat, the second adds a bass on the and of 3 that shoves the cycle into the next bar. Played as a one-bar loop the song goes mechanical within twenty seconds; alternated, it breathes. That single extra stroke is doing almost all of the musical work in this arrangement.

Surviving the tempo

At 150 the eighth-note ghosts arrive every 200 milliseconds, which is fast enough that tension anywhere in your arm will end the take early. Start at 60% and climb in fives, and pay attention to your shoulders rather than your hands. If your forearm is burning after thirty seconds you are hitting the ghosts far too hard, which is also why they will be swamping your snare.

The break is the whole trick

Two bars of nearly nothing, then everything comes back. It works because of contrast, so the quieter you can make it the bigger the return feels. Beginners tend to play the break at about 70% volume, which reads as a mistake rather than an arrangement. Take it to 25%.

Exercise 3-3 is two minutes of unbroken groove, which is the honest test of whether you can hold this song.

The exercise underneath it

3-3 - Two-minute groove

Endurance: the groove only counts if it lasts a whole song.

Practise it with Rafa

Read about this

Your first cajón grooveOne bar that fits half the songs you already know, step by step.
How to practise cajón with a metronomeHow to use a click so it makes you better instead of making you miserable.