Percussion Tip #1
On Friday, I posted three tambourine videos by Christopher Deane, Associate Professor of Percussion at the University of North Texas. (If you missed them, stop reading and go watch them. It will be the best 10 minute investment that will improve your tambourine technique forever.)
Periodically, I plan to post tips and tricks that I have learned and used over my experiences playing percussion. Since I posted the tambourine videos on Friday, I wanted to start with a tambourine tip. If you watch the first Christopher Deane video, you will notice that he is playing an incredible finger roll (sometimes called the thumb roll) in the Britten excerpt. I call it a finger roll because he is using his second finger. (BTW, I prefer that way for soft rolls, but I will talk more about it when I post my tambourine technique videos.) If you are not familiar with soft roll technique on a tambourine, you may wonder how he is able to do this. There are many ways to execute the soft roll and they all require putting something on the tambourine head. This leads to today’s tip: (more…)