I am writing a short piece for soprano recorder, violin and harp and want to add some easy but interesting percussion too. It is for players of junior school age and the percussion instrument/s are to be played by one child. The piece is a boogie woogie scarecrow dance and I had thought of adding some tambourine bits. Have any of you percussion experts any ideas of interesting things for a child to do on a tam or perhaps another school percussion instrument please?

Personally I'd be keeping it simple and repetitive. Just playing the tambourine at all is going to be great fun, but it can rapidly become not fun if you start having to do complex rhythms (and keep rolls to a minimum unless there's a percussion there to show how to do them).

If other instruments are available you could use two or three of them in the same piece, still keeping the individual parts simple. One of the simplest but greatest joys of percussion is making so many different kinds of sound. Just leave a decent amount of time to switch from one to the other though!

Absolutely agree with sonataform...

Interesting, but not confusing, tambourine parts should work well! Simple syncopation... And (as already said) NO ROLLS!


Would it be possible to grab some bongos? Bongos are fantastic - sound great and really good fun to play! The two different pitches should make the parts a little more exciting for your little kiddies too...


Other things like shakers, indian finger cymbals, claves etc are also a good bet...