Building the Homemade Cajón (Peruvian Drum)

You may have never heard of a folk instrument called a cajón. You may have seen one and not realized it was a drum. We smuggled one into our special music one Sabbath. Our church at the time had an older congregation who looked askance at percussion instruments in the sanctuary. We'd have never got a drum set approved by the church board. Turns out one of our kids sat on a a cajón playing soft percussion to fill out the guitars, bass and violin for several weeks before someone twigged to the fact that Bobby wasn't just sitting on a box, but had been playing it all along. People heard something that sounded like percussion, but couldn't figure out where it was coming from. The cajón helped desensitize our older more traditional members to the presence of a percussion instruments in church. Later he was able to play it with brushes and drumsticks (gently of course).

A cajón is shaped like a box, about the size to offer the drummer a comfortable seat. It can have a sound hole in it, slits, or no hole at all. Some mike them up with piezo-electric or other types of instrument pickups. You slap the front or rear faces, even the sides, with the hands or fingers mostly, but some drummers use brushes, mallets, or drumsticks. Cajones are widely used in South America and Africa, in Latin American music, Afro-Peruvian music as well as Mexican folk music, flamenco and  the Cuban cajón de rumba and the Mexican cajón de tapeo. 

The cajón comes originally from Peru. The cajón takes three main forms: the bass box drum, the middle drum, and the solo drum. It is believed that the bass box drum was originally developed from wood salvaged from shipping crates. The crates were large enough for the percussionist to sit on top of it. The middle drum is thought to have come from a smaller shipping box used to ship church candles. The middle drum is played with spoons rather than palms and fingers. The first solo drum may have originated from a salvaged desk drawer. Modern cajónes may be made of metal or plastic, which is up to you, but it feels blasphemous to use anything but wood.

A cajón tends to be a very personal instrument. Drummers often build their own boxes, alter the design and may use several woods to get a different tone to each face. One guy I know of builds the front from Masonite and uses three different types of wood for three different tones - one for each of the other sides. This allows him to vary the sound of the beats as though you had multiple drums.

Check lumber dealers in your area that deal in hardwoods and specialty woods. Cruise the internet for specialty wood dealers in your area. But don't necessarily depend on store-bought wood for your cajón. Old furniture can also provide you with some unique solid wood pieces in maple, mahogany, pine, cherry, and lots of other woods. You want to checked out the wood's tonal qualities in person as well as the looks of the wood. The body of the cajón is usually open on the bottom and sits flat on the floor, but if you want to skip cutting a hole in your lovely wooden drum faces, you can add short legs to lift the box off the floor to let the sound out from beneath.

One way to determine the wood tone and timbre of each wooden side is to build a plywood box the size of a cajon and leave one side off. Then simply lay the wood you are considering using and beat on it so you can hear the tone. Try different types of wood until you find a wood type that gives you the tone you like - thicker sides and thin sides. Some specialty wood dealers will let you bring your box to the store and experiment with pieces of wood they have for sale. Thinner pieces of wood will give you louder sounds when using hands, fingers or brushes. Thicker pieces may be more of a tone you want if you are using drumsticks or mallets

If it were me I'd try a variety of woods and a variety of thicknesses. I like wood salvaged from old furniture that's being trashed. You might start with maple, rock maple, cedar or spruce at first. Then give some more exotic woods a try. Make your cajón completely unique. A luthier friend once found some old growth Black Forest lumber that had been sitting in a shed in Germany for a hundred years and made violins with it using a Stradivarius pattern. They sounded wonderful. 

Also, don't discount the value of lumber from old buildings and old discarded furniture. Sometimes you can find the most beautiful sounding wood in abandoned buildings and on scrap heaps. Also try antique stores. Look for damaged furniture that the proprietor has pushed into a back room and forgotten. Old table and desktops can even be cut up to make the thicker pieces of your cajón. 

Depending on your woodworking skills you can build a cajón with whatever joining scheme you're comfortable with. If you're really good, you can fasten the sides and tops with dove-tail joints. This makes for some beautiful work You can also glue the sides and top together. You can screw it together, nail it together, or whatever you like best. You can pad the top (seat) if you want - it will certainly make the seat more comfortable. It doesn't make much if any difference in the sound. Your butt will serve to deaden the top anyway.

There are several ways to add a snare effect to your cajón. There are some add-on devices that can be attached to the cajón to create a snare effect. Another way to do this is to add 4 paired screws inside one of the thinner faces of the box and attach 4 steel guitar strings between each pair of screws - the unwound ones E, B, or G.  Tighten or loosen the strings to get the snare sound you're looking for. 

As you can see there's a lot of room for creativity in assembling your cajón. Check out the references below to get further information before diving into your project. They might suggest some ideas you can use to get just the right sound you're looking for.

© 2023 by Tom King

References:

1. https://www.instructables.com/Adjusting-a-Cajons-Snare/
2.  https://cajonbox.com/2012/03/31/tuning-your-cajon/
3. https://www.fuelrocks.com/how-to-build-a-cajon-with-guitar-strings/
4. https://lousondrums.com/products/floating-external-snare-system-for-cajon-and-cajontab

Figuring Out the Fact Check Shuffle

This post (below) keeps showing up claiming that their posts are being limited by a mysterious Facebook algorithm that limits your posts to just 25 people. It will automatically receive the dreaded "false information" tag and be blotted out. This makes people mad because the "KNOW" that Facebook is blocking them with some kind of algorithm. 

WELL THAT'S NOT WHAT'S HAPPENING.  

So technically the Fact Checkers are correct - it's misinformation.  Facebook isn't limiting you directly. Actually all your friends pages limit who they can see. Truth is, you are probably limiting which of their posts you can see because your account's newsfeed is set on a setting called "Top Stories" which gives Facebook permission to limit what posts you see in your newsfeed. Here's the post that turns out to be wrong on almost all counts except that you and your friends are limited as to what posts they can see.

• The post reads: Finally made it !! Thank you everyone for telling me how to bypass. Good to know: it’s ridiculous to have so many friends (692)and only 25 are allowed to see my posts I ignored all these posts earlier, but IT WORKS!! Thanks for the dribbling tip Facebook… Now I have a completely new profile. I see posts from people I haven’t seen in a long time. Facebook’s new algorithm chooses the same people — about 25 — who will see their posts. Press your finger anywhere in the post and click on “copy”. Go to your page and it says “what are you thinking about”. Tap your finger anywhere in the empty field. Click and paste. This will go around the system. Hello new and old friends hello Trying this because I just get adverts on my feed

And if the fact checkers flag you,
you've got to deal with these guys.

Turns out, because it's not Facebook that limits what we can see and the solution above is bogus, the fact checkers can label your post misinformation. The fact checkers are using a technicality to throw you off the scent. The fact check debunking of this posts exploits a misunderstanding as to what is actually going on. They want us to think that Facebook isn't limiting what we post and technically that's true, but it's a trick. The limiting is not happening to the "visibility of what we post." Limiting is still happening, just in a more stealthy way.

Your friends themselves (and probably you yourself) are collectively limiting what we can see of each others' posts. There is a setting on your newsfeed (where you should be seeing your friends' posts) that gives Facebook permission to limit what you see. The default setting is "Top Stories". This is the "curated" setting which filters out what FB thinks are unimportant posts and gives you what it believes is a "best of" assortment of posts; an assortment I might add that seems to lean decidedly in favor of either innocuous posts or posts which support the mainstream narrative. And we know which direction of that lean.

The good news is that you can solve the problem permanently. I'm not going to give you the convoluted process of switching your newsfeed from "Top Stories" where your views are limited to "Most Recent" where you see everything your friends post. It won't do you any good, because Facebook automatically switches you back to Top stories after a day or two and then you don't know you're being limited again and you have to go through the whole convoluted process of setting your newsfeed back to "Most Recent".

Here's what to do! There's a delightful little app called "Facebook Purity" that's free and downloadable. It's also called "Fluff Busting Purity" which for a while allowed people to post the link on Facebook. But Facebook caught on and blocked people from posting the link. Here on Blogger, I can, however post the link. And here's where to go to download it.

https://www.fbpurity.com/ 

Once you install it, it rides herd on your newsfeed setting and when Facebook tries to reset it to "Top Stories", FBP automatically resets your feed to "Most Recent".  FBP also helps you control other settings and improves your Facebook experience by letting you hide all the Ads, Suggested Posts / Related Posts / Sponsored Posts / Upcoming Events / Games your Friends are playing / Games You May Like / Similar To / Related Articles / More Like / More From etc.. It even lets you insure the posts on your newsfeed are in chronological order. This stops Facebook from putting 3 day old posts at the top of your newsfeed and keeps them coming in current time order. FBP also lets you create your own filters, block posts with specific words, turn off autoplay and a whole bunch of other things that let you see Facebook the way you want to see it without all the annoying fluff that comes with the default account setting Mr. Zuckerberg saddles you with when you sign on.

Keep an eye on your newsfeed, though. Facebook does an update ever once in a while and disables FBP. The developer is very good about coming up with a fix in short order. Sometimes FB even succeeds in removing the FBP icon so you can't use it. Just go to the website and reload it.

This app is really useful and it's FREE!  If you like it, it would be nice if you sent the guy a few bucks to say, "Thanks for making Facebook more like it ought to be and not what it is!"

Happy Facebooking all you subversives out there!

© 2023 by Tom King