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Cajon

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I realise that in all the excitement of my recent visit to BC I neglected to finish the story of my Cajon. I thought you might like to see how it was put together. The main body is glued. The straps are required to allow the glue to set thoroughly to make the joints as strong as possible.
An internal brace is glued to the front of the top of the Cajon. This will carry the snares and support to screwed top of the playing surface.
Side braces are required for the parts of the playing surface that are screwed rather than glued.
The snares are attached.
The playing surface and the back of the cajon are now glued in place, though no glue is applied to the top part of the playing surface which is screwed later. This enables it to vibrate freely and to be tuned by tensioning the screws.
Here is the cajon ready for finishing. The sound hole at the back was cut previously in School on our laser cutter! Very fancy!!
Trimmed, sanded, screwed and given two coats of wax – the cajon is finished and ready for action…

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the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
Of cabbages–and kings–
And why the sea is boiling hot–
And whether pigs have wings.”

Through the Looking Glass – Lewis Carroll

 

I am aware of having turned a corner – of having reached a milestone – of having crossed the Rubicon… and – quite possibly – of other ‘travel’ related metaphors! Kickass Canada Girl is in Victoria and life has changed. It is time to emerge, blinking, into the light of a new day, to sniff the air and to take a first look around – though perhaps mixing Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame is a step too far (on second thoughts, maybe not – I recommend to you Jackie Wullschlager’s excellent ‘Inventing Wonderland’).

It is six weeks now since I started this blog with no clear idea as to where it might lead or as to what it might include. The experience thus far has – for me at any rate – been most interesting and instructive. I thought it might be a good idea at this point to sit back and consider some of the topics that I intend to cover in the near future.

The Girl and I are currently having to jump through all of the usual administrative hoops associated with moving from one continent to another. The InterWebNet is a hugely valuable resource and I really do wonder how these things were done before its existence. I am currently watching Jeremy Paxman’s excellent (note: there are critics who disagree!) BBC documentary study of the age of Empire and I am struck by just how difficult it must then have been to perigrinate the globe the way we do now. It is quite extraordinary how much could be achieved with such rudimentary tools, and I can’t help thinking that we have lost vital skills whilst at the same time gaining much that is ephemeral. I sometimes wonder if the torrent of information through which we now wade is in fact more of a hindrance than a help. That might seem unlikely, but it has taken considerable effort on occasion to find answers relevant to my own questions. Having said that, if anything that I write should ever prove to be the slightest use to anyone following a similar path then I will be reassured that I am not simply adding to some gargantuan information landfill.

The Girl and I will be henceforth be engaged in what I believe is dysphemistically called a ‘long distance relationship’, the TLA for which is, of course, LDR. I have been reading up on LDRs (the InterWebNet is particularly fruitful on the subject, though much of it seems to be aimed at students who are separated academically) and I intend to pass on some of what I have gleaned. More pertinently I hope to discover whether any of the received wisdom actually works in practice.

I shall certainly at some point touch on retirement since I am aware that this too represents a major sea change and that there is much to be learned. My gut feeling is that retiring and moving continent at the same time will actually prove somewhat easier than doing so separately, but this of course remains to be seen.

I shall doubtless also engage in – and subsequently discourse upon – various displacement activities. Kickass Canada Girl – who is endlessly thoughtful and wise – gave me a Cajon kit before she departed. This – along with the new camera – will doubtless keep me out of trouble for a while at least.

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Cajones!

OMG!!

I have been an enthusiastic amateur musician for more than 40 years, and throughout that time I always believed that I was keeping reasonably well abreast of developments on the music scene.

The other night I was at a school production – a contemporary dance re-interpretation of Purcell’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’, with an updated score in a style which I can only describe as a jazz/blues/classical crossover. This particular production was largely the brainchild of a young man who is the son of a best-selling novelist and journalist, and who led the five piece onstage band on acoustic guitar.

Alongside him was a pianist, a bassist, a violinist and a percussionist. This latter was seated upon – and was hitting with his bare hands – what looked like a small wooden crate. The great surprise was that the sound produced was not that of a man slapping a wooden box, but rather a pretty good facsimile of a drummer playing a decent sized  kit. The bass was rich and punchy, the snare crisp and tight, and there was a full range of sounds and colours in between.

Amazing!

For those of you who – like me – have never even heard of a Cajon, let alone seen one in action, this video gives some idea of the possibilities, as does this one – though there really is no substitute for actually hearing one live.

Awesome – and not just in the Canadian usage!

As a compulsive tapper of rhythms on anything handy I think I just might need to acquire one…

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