How to Hit a Tambourine

Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Aaron Bland on behalf of Expert Village and I'm going to demonstrate to you how to play or how to strike the tambourine. So, I've got my tambourine set kind of in a tabletop manner, horizontal, so that the jingles aren't making any sound when I hold it flat like this. If you start holding it at a different angle, you can hear them kind of singing a little bit, moving around. Gravity is going to hold them into place. And, traditionally, in an orchestral setting, you would play the tambourine with your fingertips on the head itself. You can play right on the edge. You tend to get a little bit of a different sound. You'll get a different tone as well if you play right in the middle. But I found that the sweet spot is about a quarter of the way in from the edge. And you can play that with your fingertips, like I demonstrated. You can play that with the palm of your hand, if you want to get jangles to ring out a little bit more. You could play it with your fist. You tend to have a little more control though with your fingers. You could also play this, you know get creative with this, here's a mallet. You're going to get a little bit more tone produced out of the head playing with the mallet. You see, it sounds a little bit more like a drum that way. I've also got something called a wooden brush, has kind of a unique sound on it. A little bit softer attack, but still gets the jangles to move. And you can take a regular drum stick, as well, to play different rhythms on the surface of the tambourine. So there's different methods of striking the tambourine.

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