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