Thank you for watching El Tambor!

El Tambor is part of a video series designed to help music teachers and learners better understand and communicate through music. For teachers, we hope these videos can serve as instructional materials in your classes. For learners, we hope that you also watch these videos on your own and find your own ways to learn and master these songs.

Our belief is that music is learned through the study of individual songs and compositions. Each song holds its own unique musical challenges. Therefore, the more you learn, the better you will become at overcoming these musical challenges, and the stronger you will become as a musician.

We are constantly adding more videos, so if you want to stay in the loop, please subscribe!


El Tambor, which translates to ‘The Drum,’ is a folk song from Panama. Traditionally, this song is a call-and-response song with one singer singing/improvings various statements or proverbs with the chorus always responding “Yo quiero que tu me lleves, El Tambor de la Alegria”. For this video, however, we decided to focus on Kindergarten and 1st grade students, so we turned the focus of the song towards learning the names of several instruments, learning the basic words to El Tambor, and we added a fun little counting activity near the end. We hope this video will help Kindergarteners and First graders all around the world learn this song, along with learning about congas, claves, and other instruments, and we hope you have great fun with it.

свернуть