The Elusive Tambourine

Go ahead and watch the first minute of the above video. I’m sure many of you have seen it. Admit it…Yes it is a Fall Out Boy music video. So did you watch it? Yea? Notice anything odd besides Pete Wentz’s outfit? It happens right around the 0:49 second mark. The band is grooving on their catchy little bass riff, the crowds clapping along with the snare drum, and then…what the, WHO’S PLAYING THE GODDAMN TAMBOURINE??!

As you look around and notice that the other instrumentalists do not have a hidden tambourine somewhere on their

Guy behind Patrick=Tambourinist

instruments, and Patrick Stump’s hands are empty, the only other explanation is that someone in the throng of prom-goers must be the secret 5th member of Fall Out Boy. Yea. That must be it.

The truth is that many popular bands, if we were to examine their music like this, would also have secret 5th, 6th, or 7th band members comitted solely to full-time tambourine playing. Now, a note before I move any further. Technically this “elusive tambourine” trend is more of song producing trend rather than a song writing trend. In other words, during live performances of Fall Out Boy’s Dance Dance we may or may not hear the secret 5th member’s tambourine; and I doubt that when the band was actually writing this song one of them stopped and said, “we need to add tambourine right here.” In other words, the elusive tambourine added to the final version of a band’s “hit” song (the music video version) is a recording or production trick or technique used to add a strong rhythmic backbone to move the song along.

In some songs that use this technique the tambourine is quite audible like in the Fall Out Boy song above and Fountains of Wayne’s Stacy’s Mom. Others, such as The Jonas Brothers’ S.O.S. song, I believe are not really supposed to be noticed. Hence the elusiveness of this tambourine. There are many songs where the rhythmic backbone that is the tambourine is not meant to be heard consciously, but rather subconsciously. It is almost as if the production engineer didn’t want you to notice that there was a tambourine, but did want you to notice that there was something about the song that really “made it move.”

Since it is so often hard to hear, here (wow back to back homophones! Awkward…) are some tips for finding the elusive tambourine within the song “jungle.” It’s a treasure hunt! Crikey!

1. Very often a tambourine is incorporated into a song with a very slow tempo, as can be heard in Blue October’s Hate Me, Foo Fighters’ Wheels, and the very beginning of Weezer’s Perfect Situation. Thus the tambourine helps to “move the song along” and somehow actually weakens our perception that the song is moving at a very slow tempo.
2. Most of the time the tambourine only plays, or is predominant in the chorus of the song. The chorus is after all the most important part of the song, and often times a tambourine will just add that extra sparkle. An example of a song where the tambourine is only used during the chorus is Blue October’s What if We Could.
3. When listening for the tambourine, be aware that, relative to the meter of the song, the tambourine is almost always playing 16th notes. If the tambourines played 8th or quarter notes then they wouldn’t be the rhythmic powerhouses that they are! If they played 32nd notes or something, well, then it just wouldn’t sound humanly possible. All five of the examples given so far have 16th note tambourines.

Here is a playlist of the songs mentioned already plus other tambourine-happy songs. Enjoy, and I hope you might do some tambourine hunting yourself!

Tambourine Playlist