From small-town church drummer to world-class performer

By 10 I was running click, following vocal cues, navigating IEMs, and managing show flow for Sunday morning worship services that pulled close to a thousand people through the doors every weekend.

Drumming was something I was raised inside of.

I grew up in Topeka, Kansas — the wrong zip code to be born into if you want a music career. The scene was small bordering on nonexistent. I started learning percussion at the age of 4, and after rotating through various teachers, God put Jordan Hymon (Bart Walker Band, Mike Farris) in my path. For years I learned everything I knew from him: all groove, all pocket, with a couple cool fills along the way. Michael Jackson records and 90s and early 2000s gospel on blast in the speakers behind us as we played along.

We didn't talk a ton in lessons. It was all play, and I loved every second of it. He was the pocket king then and he still is in my book. Around the time I hit my teens he moved to Nashville.

By 16 I'd found marching band drumline and rivaled the biggest band nerd you thought you knew. I was dropped off early each morning to spend hours before school in the band room, just drumming. Soon my electives filled up with band, band, and more band.

For people outside the marching arts: DCI and WGI are essentially the world championships for marching bands and percussion ensembles — hundreds of auditionees from across the country, sometimes the globe, for a handful of seats. It's a beautiful blend of extraordinary discipline, teamwork, and skill-building with the freedom of art and musical pageantry.

I began auditioning at 14 and continued auditioning for years. Got cut. Practiced. Got cut. Practiced harder. Found another paramount teacher in Joe Pfau (RCC 2015, BlueQ 2011–2013). And eventually started winning quad line seats — on technical skill, marching coordination, and personality. Dojo Percussion in 2016 under Dana Murray (Berklee, Wynton Marsalis). Shadow Drum & Bugle Corps that same summer. Blue Knights in 2017, my first World Class corps, as the youngest member of the corps at 17 years old.

That felt like the right moment to make a real move and pursue music as a profession. Through Cameron Leach (Columbus Symphony Orchestra), I found Bob Breithaupt — longtime Columbus Jazz Orchestra drummer who has played with more jazz greats than I can fit in this paragraph. His students include Matt Billingslea (Taylor Swift), Brian Fullen (Shania Twain), and Stephan Fess (Jared Blake). I was hungry for a bigger room, harder competition, and a better teacher. Bob was all three. I was provided with a scholarship to Capital University Conservatory of Music.

I came back as section leader of the quad line for Blue Knights in 2018 and we had another paramount summer. While juggling school I made it into two more World Class championship-winning ensembles for the 2020 season: Rhythm X and the Bluecoats.

And right when I'd hit the pinnacle of everything I'd been chasing since I was 10 — the world fell apart.

I'd love to say I held it together through the pandemic. I didn't. The conservatory closed, I dropped out of my classes, drove back to Kansas, and worked the family farm as a 21-year-old musician with no work, no money, no degree, and to top it all off, a concussion that kept me off the kit and out of gigging. That one beat the hell out of me. I sat out a year and a half depressed, healing, dealing with chronic headaches, watching the musical world I'd built feel like it was crumbling in real time.

I think I generally undersell the severity of that injury. At a certain point, it stopped feeling like I was just “recovering” and started feeling like I was disappearing. I realized if I didn't choose something, I was going to lose more than just music.

In the thick of it, I promised my mom I'd finish school. But really that was a promise I made to myself.

Summer of 2021 I picked it back up.

I have approached every day since as if it is day one.

That mentality is where the work I'm doing now actually comes from. I call myself an Architect of Sound because rebuilding from zero forced me to understand how music is constructed. To pay attention beyond what I play, but how I think. The decisions underneath the decisions. The system underpinning the work. Success is a process, not a destination. That's what I create and document. That's what I teach.

An architect designs the structure, the flow, the load-bearing elements you don't see. That's how I approach music now. I'm building frameworks that hold under pressure — live, in the moment, across genres, across rooms, across artists.

My niche is the exact blend of my father, a technology teacher, and my mother, a music teacher. Acoustic and electronic integration. Running tracks, triggering samples, blending kit and machine across every genre I can get my hands on.

The receipts: main-stage festival sets at Columbus Pride and ComFest in 2024 and 2025 with KJ The Cool Nerd and KeezyTheeUnkind. The musical theatre drum chair at Short North Stage for Rock of Ages in 2022. Performances at the Ginger Rabbit Jazz Lounge with Rob Dove, Brothers Drake with Waves De Ache, Rambling House with AR!YAH, Spacebar with Valerie Lighthart, and rooms across Columbus with WANYEH, J.SOL, and a roster of independent artists across the Great Lakes. Library Educational Tours with the Jazz Arts Group. And a featured drummer with Louis Pettinelli Entertainment for high-profile weddings and corporate events across the region.

The blueprint is bigger.

Headlining stages I grew up studying and dreaming about — Coachella, Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Stagecoach, Rolling Loud, all of them.

The future is something I'm architecting and constructing, piece by piece. Come build it with me.