Armed with recyclable materials such as buckets, pans and plastic, this man took his music to the streets to make a living.
People were awed as Matthew Pretty, bucket drummer extraordinaire, showcased his incredible skills with an unusual percussion set during the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Although he’s not a household name, Pretty still has a following of his own.
Pretty is an American drummer who got his start playing drums when he was three years old. He got curious and took an interest in coming up with new sounds that he could produce from various things. That’s when he tried experimenting it with buckets.
With that, he started busking on the streets with pans and buckets. People loved his show because of his quirkiness and fun vibe, which made for great crowd entertainment. Throughout the set, he’s well-mannered and definitely confident in his skills. Pretty has already marched his drums to different countries and allured different crowds with his unique talent.
In this clip, he decided to strip everything down to just buckets and pans.
He uses one bucket as a bass drum and another filled with coins as a snare. He also brings two cymbal with him and three of his mother’s kitchen pans. Finally, he has two extra buckets, one of which he uses as a chair.
He definitely has a unique way of using his cymbals! Instead of mounting them up in the air, he steps on them to give off a suppressed sound and releases them when he wants a loud, crashing sound. Matthew does not really need to buy actual drums or electronic drums—instead, he was able to mix and match any material he could think of to make beautiful music!
His skills are the real deal!
Matthew is not just good with the music—he’s also a crowd pleaser. He magnetizes everybody around the area when he plays and instantly captures everyone’s attention as soon as he’s around.
After he introduced his drum set to the crowd, he told people that at the end of his show, he would attempt to break his last bucket (which already had a crack in it). After that, Pretty played a funky drum beat and left his drum set to roam around the street. Still, he kept playing a beat the whole time by drumming on the pavement. He even performed stunts like juggling in the middle of it!
For the second part of the show, he invited people to hold some of the drums for him. This went on with more than five volunteers holding his drums, all as a set-up for his grand finale. Pretty nailed it by giving the people a spectacular performance and stabbing the cracked bucket like he told the crowd he would at the beginning. When his show finally ended, he hilariously exclaimed: “Wait, wait, wait, give me money!”
Since the video was posted, it has earned more than a million views on YouTube.
Though it goes without saying, people really loved the show he put on! The video was originally uploaded by YouTube channel justwalk and has been taking the internet by storm ever since. Although there are plenty of bucket drumming videos on the internet, Pretty took his performance to the next level with some serious crowd interaction.
Congratulations to Matthew Pretty on this awesome show! Watch the entire thing in the link below:
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