Arthur Dubois | The drummer who plays water

Dip a chime into a bowl of water while it is still ringing and the pitch bends downwards, because the water damps and loads the vibrating metal.

Arthur Dubois built a following of millions on that idea, and on about fifty others like it.

He is one of the very few people treating the drum kit as a sound design problem rather than a rhythm one, and the results are genuinely unlike anything else being made.

Who is Arthur Dubois?

Arthur Dubois is a French drummer and percussionist.

His work is built on a hybrid setup: acoustic drums fused with unconventional objects, Sensory Percussion sensors and electronic triggers. The point is not to play faster or heavier; it is to make sounds that do not otherwise exist.

Drumeo’s panel gave him the Viola Smith Award for Defying Expectations in 2023, which is precisely the right category.

The water videos

The best-known material involves water — a drum, a bowl, chimes dipped in and out while ringing, splashes recorded and triggered back.

One of those videos passed three million views. It is worth watching once for the trick and a second time for the musicality: he is not just demonstrating a physics curiosity, he is playing a part with it.

The underlying idea is straightforward and rich. Water changes the pitch and decay of anything vibrating that touches it. A chime lowered into water bends flat; raised out, it bends sharp. That gives you a pitch-bend on a percussion instrument, which is not a thing percussion instruments normally have.

What Arthur Dubois actually does

He designs sounds and then plays them. The order matters. Most hybrid drummers pick sounds from a library. He makes them.

He uses sensors properly. Sensory Percussion reads where on a head you strike and how hard, and maps that to triggered sound. In most hands that is a novelty. In his it means one drum can be an entire instrument, with the strike position acting as a control.

He plays real parts. The videos are grooves and compositions, not demonstrations.

He is funny about it. A lot of the appeal is the reveal — the moment you work out what is actually making the noise.

Arthur Dubois’s setup

• Percussion — Meinl, where he is a listed artist. Meinl’s percussion arm makes a great deal of the unconventional metal and effects percussion his work relies on.
• Sensors — Evans Hybrid / Sensory Percussion. He is a listed artist for the Evans hybrid sensory range — we covered the broader idea when it arrived on cymbals in our Evans Hybrid piece.
• Water, bowls, chimes and whatever else works.

Every era, with buy links, is on Arthur Dubois’s Rig Vault page.

Want the sound without the rig?

This is the most fun entry on the site, and it costs nothing to try.

Get a bowl of water and a chime. Or a small cymbal, or a triangle. Strike it, then lower it into the water while it rings. That is a pitch bend, on a percussion instrument, for free.

Then put a cymbal in there. A small splash lowered into water while ringing does something extraordinary, and drummers have been doing it in studios for decades.

And try a sensor. Sensory Percussion and the Evans Hybrid range are the modern route into this, and they turn a single drum into a whole palette. Our electronic drum kit guide covers the hybrid side, and the Gear Guru will spec the rest.

(Obvious warning: water and electronics do not mix. Keep the bowl away from the triggers.)

Where to start

• The water drumming videos. Start with the three-million-view one.
• His hybrid drumming material with Meinl. Where he explains the setup.
• Anything using the sensors. Watch how much the strike position is doing.

Final thoughts

Every so often somebody looks at an instrument that has been essentially settled for a century and asks a genuinely new question about it. Dubois is doing that with percussion, and the questions are good ones: what if the pitch could bend? What if where you hit mattered as much as how hard?

Defying expectations is the award, and it fits. Most drummers spend their careers getting better at the existing thing. He is quietly building a different one.

See Arthur Dubois’s full rig in the Rig Vault, or read about Jonathan Barber — another drummer using Sensory Percussion as a musical instrument rather than a gimmick.