My Meinl cajon drum set

[Bruce (the K)]

I'm still a dyed-in-the-wool cocktail drummer who prefers playing drums standing up. However, I'm also a committed minimalist who can't stand carrying anything extra. I'm also into playing at low volume to accompany acoustic, vocal-harmony-focused music. All that to say, I've stumbled onto the cajon drum set scene.

I've never owned a drummer's throne but, if I'm carrying a cajon to the gig, I don't see anything wrong with sitting on it once I'm there. I didn't have much of what I needed to make a cajon-centered drum set so I got a Meinl build-your-own cajon kit, a cajon snare drum and a low hi-hat cymbal stand to clamp the cajon snare to. I have 12-inch hats for my cocktail kit but I got 10-inch Stagg hats for this set-up. I also needed a cajon pedal so I could play the cajon itself as my bass drum, leaving both my hands free to play the snare and hi-hat, using bundled Cool Rods.

Cajon pedals are a scene in themselves, with lots of interesting variations in how they do the job. After some research, I settled on the Meinl direct-drive 'pedal,' which has this weird curved bar instead of a pedal. It looks strange but it is very simple mechanically and I got used to it very quickly. Many of the other pedals use cables to connect a conventional pedal to the beater assembly and there are lots of complaints about their 'feel' and about the cables breaking during gigs. There are also more complex direct-drive pedals that are much more expensive so I decided to keep it simple. No regrets on that, so far.

I added a 14-inch floor tom with an extra clamp to hold a crash/ride cymbal on a 3/8 inch rod with a cymbal holder on the end. I don't want the full volume of the tom so I use Ringo's 'tea-towel' approach: I use double-sided mounting tape to hold an old towel cut to fit the top of the tom and that gives me a volume similar to the rest of the kit. Basically, I have a 3-piece kit (cajon bass, cajon snare, and conventional-but-muffled floor tom, with little hi-hats, a Meinl jingle ring, and a crash-ride cymbal).

I soon tired of lugging the low hi-hat stand, since I never really learned to play a hi-hat pedal (I needed my left foot to stand on while I played the kick drum with my right foot). I've since gotten rid of it and I now use the bottom half of a mic stand to hold my cajon snare and the passive hi-hat set-up from my cocktail drum set. That's the set you can see in the attached pictures.

I'm using this set-up for busking with two (unamplified) acoustic guitars and an acoustic bass guitar played through a little 10-watt battery-powered Joyo bass amp (just so we can hear it at all). The volume of this kit is perfect for that kind of unamplified situation, although I know others with similar set-ups who use a mic or two and a little amp to keep up with louder, amplified instruments.

Just another way to get creative with my drums, something cocktail drum kits (and this site) got me started on.