How to play When the Saints Go Marching In on cajón
A full cajón part for the traditional When the Saints Go Marching In: a swung two-feel, where the accents go, and how to lift into the last chorus.
- Tempo
- 120 BPM
- Time
- 4/4
- Feel
- swung
- Bars
- 23
- Difficulty
- easy
Intro2 bars · 1 written ×2
introFour bare snares, one per beat, like a drummer counting a marching band in. Two bars and everyone knows where the beat is.
Verse8 bars · 1 written ×8
verseA two-feel: bass on 1 and 3, snare on 2 and 4, ghosts light. Keep it under the singing. This is accompaniment, not a solo.
Chorus8 bars · 1 written ×8
chorusGhosts fill in and the groove doubles up underneath. Same accents, more motion, so it lifts without getting louder.
Last chorus4 bars · 1 written ×4
chorusExtra bass on the and of 3 and the snares open right up. Last time through, so it should sound like it.
Outro1 bars
outroOne bar, then a bass on the downbeat of the next and stop.
Legend: B bass · S snare · g ghost · · rest. Written at 120 BPM.
Play it and find out how you did
The backing plays in your ears while you record, so Rafa hears only your box. He will tell you how consistent you were and whether you drifted across the take.
Every busker, church band and campfire in the English-speaking world knows this one, which makes it the single most useful tune on this page. It is also a good first play-with-other-people song, because the form is short and it comes round again quickly if you get lost.
It swings
The eighth notes are not even. The “and” sits late, closer to the following beat than to the one before it, which is what gives it the New Orleans roll. If you play the ghosts dead straight it turns into a military march, which is a different and much stiffer song. Listen to the playback here rather than reading the grid literally, because a grid cannot show swing and this is the one place that matters.
The two-feel
The verse leaves the “and” of 1 and 3 completely empty, and that space is deliberate. It gives the singer somewhere to be. When the chorus arrives you fill those gaps with ghosts and the whole thing lifts without a single extra decibel, which is the trick worth stealing from this arrangement.
What to get right first
A clean, bright snare, because in a two-feel there is nowhere for a weak backbeat to hide. Half the notes in the verse are snares and they are all exposed. The snare page covers what to fix if yours is dull or inconsistent, and exercise 2-3 is this skeleton with a recorded take.
The exercise underneath it
2-3 - Backbeat skeleton
Bass on 1 & 3, snare on 2 & 4 - the skeleton of pop music.
Practise it with RafaRead about this
- Your first cajón grooveOne bar that fits half the songs you already know, step by step.
- How to get a clean snare sound on cajónThe crack at the top corner is your backbeat. Here is how to make it speak.
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