Boy, some of you are so full of it, I wonder sometimes why I even bother.
Tom Eaton, however, has some sense.
There is no Fairlight on that recording, and no Wendel.
The tambourine is not done with any machine.
It just so happens that I can actually play the thing the way I want it to sound.
I played and sang every single thing on "Legs" except for Billy's lead guitar and lead vocal, and a triple of my two harmony tracks by Jimmy Jamison.
The tambourine, which I still have (and just looked at this moment), is one of my two blue plastic ones that I bought about that time ('82-83) from Robert Hall. I can't tell the brand, because where the logo might be I have some tape, and I'm not taking it off!
The way i got the clean sound was indeed to angle the metal "jingles" so that they only rang as long as I wanted them to. In this case, that would have been almost perfectly vertical. The tamb was held and "swung" with the right hand, and hit upon the heel of my left palm.
Reverb was added, in this particular case an AMS RMX with both plate and whatever program 8 was.