Hi! I’m Josh, and I play drums in a band called Twenty One Pilots. It’s the most fun thing I’ve ever done in my life—except for maybe swimming in the ocean once with dolphins in sight. But for real, it’s cool to be writing this because Modern Drummer was a huge platform for me to discover new music and new drummers.

The band I play in consists of two members: my best friend, Tyler Joseph, and me. Tyler plays piano, sings, raps, and runs around a lot. We’ve been playing music together for close to two years now. It has been fun to create and play songs that are a mixture of a lot of different genres. I like to play all sorts of different styles of music, so it’s fun to get to play them all within any given song.

As for influences, I have a lot. I remember when I was getting into music I enveloped myself in different drumming websites, clicking on random drummers’ videos and watching and researching them. When I started performing, I sort of developed a style of my own, grabbing different things that I thought were really cool or interesting from a bunch of different drummers in videos that I had seen. I might get ripped apart for this, but I came up with this idea that if I sat my sixteen-year-old sister (who knows nothing about drums) down in front of some videos of extremely technical and talented drummers, she would think it’s cool but wouldn’t care that much. I wanted to try and improve my stage presence and style a little bit. I want to be able to impress musicians, but now I also focus on impressing my sister. Advertisement

Drummers can get the rap of just sitting in the back and simply keeping time. I believe that it should be more than that. I was always most into watching the most energetic, crazy drummers with a lot of personality. I try every day to push myself to get better at my instrument and also get better at performing, which I believe are two separate things that go hand in hand with each other. I do a lot of pushups though, so hopefully that’s helping things.

I recently got a kit made by some cool guys at SJC drums. My blue acrylic (20×24, 16×16, and 9×12) is my most favorite kit I’ve ever owned. It’s sometimes hard to order a kit from an idea that you have in your mind, because you just have to hope that they will sound good. Well, they sound exactly how I hoped they would.

Again, it’s really cool to be a part of the MD website. If you’re into discovering new music, like I was, feel free to check out my band.

 

For more information on Josh Dun visit twentyonepilots.com.