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Do you love or hate a cajon?
- Thread starter LBS-bass
- Start date
BobDeRosa
Commercial User
- May 16, 2012
- 2,444
- 4,402
- Disclosures
- Owner, Tritone Jazz Fantasy Camps
It's tough to hate an instrument (except bagpipes). More likely to have feelings about the way it's played.
Acknowledged! But I'd rather get with a musical player with a plywood sheet, than a frenzied poser with the hippest cajon imaginable. Once did a jam where an accomplished drummer sat on a wooden chest, and proceeded to rock that thing - those sheets and blankets, inside, didn't stand a chance...
All readers of this thread need to check out this link - scroll past the metal bit, and enter the world of high-end cajons...cajons with cojones!
I've heard some folks that made them sound really great, and I've heard some that made me wish I had hearing aids so I could turn them off. I have one, it occasionally gets used at the fire and such, I like them quite a lot if played well and appropriately.
Do y'all have examples of the sort of cajon playing you don't like? Inquiring minds, and all...
since most seem to use them to trigger sampled drum sounds , why bother sitting all hunched over on a wooden box ..!??
seems like child punishment from the 50's .. !!
why not use a ' suit case ' kit ..? tiny kits they drug around for USO band players in WWII .. ??
or make your own tiny kit ..? here's mine that i use to program drum machine , sequence or record beats/parts ...
seems like child punishment from the 50's .. !!
why not use a ' suit case ' kit ..? tiny kits they drug around for USO band players in WWII .. ??
or make your own tiny kit ..? here's mine that i use to program drum machine , sequence or record beats/parts ...
whoops , didn't answer question ... don't love or hate , just seems to be better alternatives ...
Depends on the gig. I love them for quieter, more folksy or stripped down sets - especially alongside upright bass.
The cajon evolved from a tradition of drumming on packing crates, so in essence a cajon, at its heart, very much is just a wooden box. We can improve on that, if we want it to sound like something better than its traditional roots would suggest. I suppose a traditionalist could argue that it shouldn't be improved due to history, but I'd suggest that those earliest cajonists weren't worried about tone but were just happy to be able to drum on something.
My husband plays drums and percussion. He has studied latin percussion with conga and bongos and various other things. What he has found in the local music scene is that understanding complex rhythms and being able to play with that level of understanding has almost no appreciation; people think you're doing an adequate job if you're just banging on things. Forget about high end anything, nobody cares.
He was briefly in a band with two percussionists, one guy was a kit drummer who had alcohol issues. My husband was brought in to mainly provide hand percussion, but the bandleader kept saying they'd "trade off" because he didn't know if alcohol guy would aways be available and he wanted them to be able to play smaller shows where a kit wasn't viable.
As you can imagine, this was a recipe for disaster. Alcohol guy knew nothing about playing percussion and his idea of playing a cajon or a conga was just to hit 16th notes as hard as he could. My husband was trying to play tasteful licks on top of this, which of course didn't work.
That band was a train wreck for a variety of reasons but when my husband complained that the other guy wasn't leaving room for him, it turned into a contest and alcohol guy ultimately became their drummer, which was stupid because they were rehearsing at our house and that guy was a no show to more than half the rehearsals. Oh well.
The drum position in that band ultimately became a big revolving door and I don't think they were ever really able to get things together before COVID hit. But I digress. My point is that often people don't recognize good training on percussion for what it is.
Since then he's had offers to work with bands that advertised they wanted a drummer but then said, "do you have a cajon?" To him that's a red flag that tells him they don't want what he offers and he will decline those offers.
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Not for me. They’re in my list with amplified buskers, singer-songwriters using loop pedals and that fad of everyone tapping their acoustic guitars
Hate? Nope, but I think they've become waaay overused. It's not original anymore, nor is it cute. Just played out.
Find any example of someone playing a 2-4 backbeat on a cajon as if it were a kick and snare in a pop tune and you’ll be there, for me at least.
Or there's this.
You may laugh, but a drummer in my band actually used this for our first three gigs. It was really not that bad, at least for a plain pop music. It lacks dynamics, though, so he bought an adult e-drum kit, and this thing now serves him as an additional percussion set.
Or there's this.
View attachment 3916252
You may laugh, but a drummer in my band actually used this for our first three gigs. It was really not that bad, at least for a plain pop music. It lacks dynamics, though, so he bought an adult e-drum kit, and this thing now serves him as an additional percussion set.
i used a one-piece "kit" something like that for a while. it turned out to be a gateway drug to larger electronic kits, but it did get the job done for simpler music. mine had some dynamics, though.
