How to Play a Thumb Roll on the Tambourine

Video Transcript

Hi. I'm Aaron Bland on behalf of Expert Village and I'm going to demonstrate for you the technique for playing a tambourine thumb roll. Now, usually, the tambourine thumb roll is played by getting enough friction built up between your thumb and the head of the tambourine and you're going to get that to kind of vibrate. Now you can use wax or resin on your fingers. I prefer to create that friction, if you can't do it naturally just with the natural sweat and oils from your hands, you can get that just by licking your thumb, wiping it real quick so that it's moist, not wet, and just letting that friction get the jangles of the tambourine to jingle for you. Now, my preference in using this technique is to actually use my middle finger. I've got a little bit more leverage and digits to work with to build up. Not too much, you don't want to press too hard but you can rub your finger. You can kind of hear this. You can use this technique on just about any hand drum as well just to kind of get it to sing out for you. And, if you get enough friction built up, you can really get the jangles to move for you too. Right now, I'm going straight across the head. By using as much surface area as you can, you can kind of use that half moon shape pattern just to really get that roll to ring out for you as much as possible. It takes a little bit of practice, takes a little bit of warming up, just to get it going, but I'm going to try to play a couple of good ones for you. Check it out. Oh, there's one more thing I've just thought of now, putting an accent at the very end, especially when you're running straight across the tambourine like this. If you hit your thumb right at the very end to get the tambourine to kind of play an accent, there's an application of your thumb roll played with my middle finger.

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