Should you ever have kids who pester you about getting a drum set for them, you might want to buy them some large plastic buckets and a set of drumsticks instead. If they object, as they surely will, just show them this video of drummer extraordinaire Gordo Robinson.
Robinson grew up in Dubbo, Australia, about 200 miles northwest of Sydney. He studied music in Japan, but it was seeing videos of 1990s-era New York City bucket drummers that not only inspired him but also helped him learn the art himself.
Gordo plays in a couple of bands but also busks on the streets of Sydney, something he’s been doing since he was 17. “It doesn’t matter if people are watching you, as long as you’re excited about your own performance and about playing yourself. Then you can do a good performance, but it’s always enhanced by people watching. Having a crowd, you get another sense of adrenaline.”
According to Robinson, buckets opened up a whole new way of drumming. Plastic buckets produce a sound that’s short, sharp, and thin. This is why he tends to play really fast patterns: it fills in space between the notes. With conventional drums, there are booms and echoes that fill in that space. Robinson says that if you play slowly on the buckets, you get a “lonely sound.”
As you’ll see in the video posted below, Robinson is an amazing drummer, even when all he has to work with are plastic buckets. The beat is incredibly fast, and the overall effect is nothing less than mesmerizing. It’s no wonder that the video has attracted an astounding 150 million views. Did you ever imagine this kind of sound could come from plastic buckets? Don’t miss Robinson pounding the buckets in the video below.
