I'm very happy right now.
We've been working hard for months to narrow down our preferred snare mechanism for cajon drums and our CajonTabs. I'm so pleased to say, I think we finally have it!
Our design is a little bit "outside the box", if you will. (pun very intended). Check out the floating snare:
We settled on this design for a few reasons. To begin with, a cut snare design (which are most of the affordable cajon drums on the market) is very often a very buzzy and rattly affair. The loose snare ends tend to bend away from the tapa every so slightly and a simple bass tone can often set your entire snare mechanism to rattling. This phenomena is less pronounced on full size cajon drums than our CajonTab, but its still there. Go check out the floor models of cajon drums at your local music store. Tap around on them and I guarantee you'll find a few with some heinous buzzing going on.
There seems to almost be an acceptance among cajon manufacturers that buzzing snare wires are simply going to happen. While that may be true to some extant, we believed we could do better and I think we have.
Our snare is designed to be held gently in place, flush with the tapa and making good contact the length of the snare wires. Whats more, our mechanism includes some light dampening, both inside snare frame as well as because of the frame itself. The gentle pressure on the tapa reduces vibrations, which reduces buzzing. You can actually test this yourself by opening the sound hole on one of our CajonTab w snare models while you play. You will reach a point opening the port where the snare will be overly vibrated by the resonating tapa. For this reason, we recommend a fully closed or mostly closed sound port when playing in snare configuration.
Check out this short demo of the CajonTab w external snare:
These external snares were designed to fit our CajonTabs, but they are amazing on full size cajon drums as well. Check out this video of converting a non-snare cajon to a snare cajon using our external snare.
We're very excited about the external snare, both for our CajonTabs as well as for use with full size cajon drums. Check out the CajonTab with snare or the external cajon snare as a stand alone item.