Five students at Lake Howell High School in Winter Park, Florida, won their school talent show with a synchronised drum routine they built in just one week. Nigel, Dylan, Matt, Elias and Jordan called themselves the "Hot Scots" drum line, took the stage in black T-shirts and tartan kilts, and turned a row of five drums into a tightly choreographed show of rhythm, stick tricks and comic timing.
The performance was filmed and uploaded to YouTube in March 2011 by a user called fernandiish, and it has resurfaced on social media many times since. Despite the kilts, the group was American; the uploader noted that the tartan was purely a costume.
Watch the performance
Thanks to fernandiish for recording and sharing the clip; more of his uploads are on his YouTube channel.
What makes the routine work
Talent-show crowds see plenty of loud drumming. What lifts this act is how much of it is visual. The five players stand shoulder to shoulder and pass patterns down the line, so a phrase starts at one end and ripples to the other. They switch between playing their own drum and reaching over to hit a neighbour's, which looks chaotic but only works if every hand arrives at exactly the right moment.
Three ideas from competitive drum lines are at the heart of it:
- Unison. When all five hit at once, the sound is huge and the movement looks like one body. Any player who is a fraction early or late stands out immediately.
- Splits and call-and-response. Parts of the pattern are divided between players, so no one plays the whole rhythm but the audience hears it complete.
- Visuals. Stick flips, crossed arms and synchronised body moves are rehearsed as carefully as the notes. In marching percussion, judges score these elements alongside musical accuracy.
Pulling that off in a week suggests the players already had serious experience, most likely from a school marching band or drum line, where such routines are a staple of halftime shows and indoor percussion contests.
About Lake Howell High School
Lake Howell High School opened in 1974 and is a public school in Seminole County, on the north-east side of the Orlando area. Its teams are the Silver Hawks. The school's alumni include several professional musicians, among them members of the a cappella group VoicePlay, which says something about the strength of music at the school.
School talent shows like this one are often the first time young performers face a full auditorium. For many students, the week of planning, arguing over arrangements and rehearsing after class is as memorable as the night itself.
Drumming and health: what the research says
Videos like this are often shared with sweeping claims that drumming heals the body, boosts immunity and fights cancer. The research behind those claims is interesting, but much narrower than the headlines.
The study cited most often was led by Dr. Barry Bittman and published in the journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine in 2001. It involved 111 healthy adult volunteers. After a single session of a specific style of group drumming with guided exercises, blood tests showed a rise in the activity of natural killer cells and lymphokine-activated killer cells, two parts of the immune system, and a higher ratio of the hormone DHEA to the stress hormone cortisol, compared with control groups. Questionnaire scores for anxiety and depression did not change.
That is a genuine finding, but it has clear limits. It was one session, in healthy people, measuring short-term changes in lab markers. It did not show that drumming prevents or treats cancer, speeds healing, or protects anyone from disease. Later studies, including work with mental-health service users and people in recovery programmes, have reported benefits for mood and social connection, but these are mostly small trials.
A fair summary: group drumming is an enjoyable, sociable activity that may help some people feel less stressed. It is not a medical treatment. Anyone dealing with a health condition should talk to a doctor, and can enjoy drumming alongside that care.
Are drummers really smarter?
A popular story says that science has proved drummers are cleverer than their bandmates. It traces back to a 2008 study by Fredrik Ullén of Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, with Guy Madison of Umeå University, published in The Journal of Neuroscience.
The researchers asked participants to tap along to a simple, regular beat and measured how steady their timing was. People who tapped more evenly tended to score higher on intelligence tests and had more white matter in parts of the frontal lobes linked to planning and problem-solving. The team stressed that the task did not measure musical rhythm.
The study did not test drummers at all, and it found a correlation rather than cause and effect. Practising drums will not raise anyone's IQ, as far as this evidence shows. What it does suggest is that keeping precise time draws on some of the same brain systems we use for focused thinking, which is a nice point in favour of musicians who spend years refining their timing.
Getting started with drumming
If the Hot Scots have inspired you, drumming is one of the easiest instruments to start with and one of the most social.
- Begin with a practice pad and sticks. They are cheap, quiet and enough to learn basic rudiments such as single strokes, double strokes and paradiddles.
- Use a metronome. Steady time matters more than speed, as any drum line instructor will say.
- Look for a group. School bands, community drum circles and percussion ensembles teach you to lock in with others, which is where the fun is.
- Protect your hearing. Snare drums are loud at close range; musicians' earplugs reduce volume without muffling the sound.
And if you only have a week before the talent show, the example above shows what matters most: a simple idea, rehearsed until five people move as one.
Sources: fernandiish on YouTube, March 2011: The Official Hot Scots drum line, Talent Show at LHHS; Wikipedia: Lake Howell High School; Bittman et al., 2001, Composite effects of group drumming music therapy (Loma Linda University record); ScienceDaily, April 2008: intelligence linked to good timing (Karolinska Institutet).
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