Buckets The Drummer | A bathtub, a bucket, a horse mask

A shower curtain is thrown open. Behind it, sitting in a bathtub, is a man wearing a horse mask, red flannel and blue jeans, holding a pair of drumsticks and a five-gallon bucket.

Then he plays something genuinely good.

This is Buckets The Drummer, he has millions of followers, and he is one of the funniest things in drumming.

Who is Buckets The Drummer?

Buckets The Drummer is an internet character — a musician and silent comic who began posting videos in early 2021.

The format never changes. A bathroom. A bathtub. A shower curtain. A horse mask. One five-gallon bucket. No dialogue.

It has taken him to roughly 3.9 million followers on TikTok and a million on Instagram, plus YouTube, Facebook, released music on Spotify and Apple Music, and a merchandise line.

Drumeo’s voters gave him Instagram Drummer Of The Year in 2024.

On identity: the person behind the mask has not been publicly confirmed, and we are not going to guess. The character is the act, and unmasking somebody who has chosen a mask is not our business.

Why it works

It would be easy to write this off as a gimmick, and the reason it is not is worth spelling out.

The playing is real. The grooves are correct, the fills land, the time is good. A bucket is an unforgiving instrument — one pitch, no dynamics to speak of, no sustain — and everything has to come from placement and accent.

The comedy is properly constructed. The reveal, the deadpan, the total absence of explanation. Silent comedy is a craft and he is doing it deliberately.

The format is a constraint. One bucket, one bathroom, one costume. Constraints force invention, and it is why the videos have stayed interesting for five years rather than five weeks.

It is joyful. Drumming’s internet is heavily weighted towards technical seriousness. There is room for a man in a horse mask.

Buckets The Drummer’s setup

It really is what it looks like.

• A five-gallon bucket. The standard plastic builder’s bucket. Struck on the top rim, the side wall and the base for three different sounds.
• A pair of drumsticks.
• A bathtub. Which, incidentally, does a lot for the sound — a hard-surfaced enclosed space is a natural reverb chamber, and it is a large part of why the videos sound as good as they do.

Every era, with buy links, is on Buckets The Drummer’s Rig Vault page.

Want the sound without the rig?

This is the only page on this site where the answer costs under a tenner.

Buy a bucket. Genuinely. Bucket drumming is a real discipline, widely used in school music programmes precisely because it is cheap and it teaches the things that matter: rhythm, accent, dynamics and independence, with no tuning and no maintenance.

Then find the three sounds. The rim, the side and the base of a bucket all speak differently. That is your snare, your tom and your kick.

And play in a bathroom. Not a joke — hard surfaces make cheap percussion sound enormous, and it is the cheapest reverb you will ever get.

If you would rather have an actual kit eventually, our beginner drum kit guide covers the first real purchase, and the Gear Guru will spec one to a budget.

Where to start

• Any of the bathtub videos. The format is the point; watch three in a row.
• His released music. There is more of it than you would expect.

Final thoughts

There is a version of drumming culture that takes itself extremely seriously — gear, technique, transcription, argument. All of that is good and this site is largely made of it.

But an award voted for by hundreds of thousands of drummers went, in 2024, to an anonymous man in a horse mask hitting a builder’s bucket in a bath. That is a healthy sign about the community, and about the instrument.

He is also, and this is the part that keeps getting overlooked, a good drummer.

See Buckets The Drummer’s full rig in the Rig Vault, or read about Kriss Drummer — another winner of the same award, doing something entirely different with it.