Video: How to Keep Time on Tambourines

Learn how to keep time on tambourine in order to produce the best sound and melody in this free video series that will have you mastering this percussive instrument in no time.

Video Transcript

I'm going to demonstrate another playing technique for the tambourine. Now, unless you're standing in the orchestra pit, you're probably not watching the tambourine player play like this. You're looking at MTV, you're watching a rock concert and the lead singer picks up the tambourine or the percussionist picks up the tambourine and keeps time with the song, with a back and forth motion, like this. So instead of holding it in a horizontal rim, holding it vertically sliding it back and fourth, one of the most popular ways to keep time on the tambourine. Now, using that side to side motion, you kind of have to calibrate your arm motion like this to get it to sound even, to get all of the notes evenly spaced, unless you want to intentionally swing what you're playing. Here's some straight time. And especially this works out best at slower tempos, you can kind of swing or delay the back beat when you pull your arm out. You can see there's a little bit of a delay there. So if you are practicing technique, practice keeping it straight first, just so you can really, really time the motion to the left, the motion to the right and get those as even as you can. Then work them up to speed. There's playing straight time on the tambourine.

How to Keep Time on Tambourines

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