Josh Dun | Twenty One Pilots' other half
Josh Dun drums for Twenty One Pilots and plays to stadiums with one other person. His hybrid setup, the Clancy tour kit, and his SJC and Zildjian rig.
There are two people in Twenty One Pilots. One of them plays everything else. The other plays drums, and has to fill a stadium doing it.
Josh Dun has one of the most exposed jobs in modern music: no second guitarist to hide behind, no bass player to lock in with, and an audience of tens of thousands who know every part. He also, routinely, plays a drum kit while standing on the crowd.
Here is the drummer holding up half of one of the biggest live acts on the planet.
Who is Josh Dun?
Joshua William Dun was born on 18 June 1988 in Columbus, Ohio.
His route in was unusual. He grew up in a household where a career in music was not the plan, bought a kit at seventeen, and taught himself — much later than most professionals start.
He drummed for the Ohio band House of Heroes before joining Twenty One Pilots in 2011, replacing the band’s original rhythm section. He and Tyler Joseph have been the entire group ever since.
The records
Vessel (2013), Blurryface (2015), Trench (2018), Scaled and Icy (2021), Clancy (2024).
Blurryface is the record that broke them — “Stressed Out” and “Ride” went from a Columbus club band to Grammy stages in about eighteen months. They won Best Pop Duo/Group Performance in 2017 for “Stressed Out”.
What Josh Dun actually does
He plays like there is no one else in the band, because there mostly is not. Every hole in an arrangement is his to fill. It makes him play bigger than the songs technically require, and that is the correct decision.
He is a hybrid player. Acoustic kit and electronic pads together, triggering the samples and sub-drops the songs are built on. He is not playing along to tracks so much as performing them.
He hits genuinely hard. For a band filed under pop, the physical weight of his snare and floor tom is closer to a hardcore drummer’s.
He plays for energy over complexity. There is very little in the catalogue that is technically difficult. There is a great deal that is exhausting, at 200bpm, for ninety minutes, in front of a crowd expecting a backflip.
He is a performer. The kit on the crowd’s hands, the platform in the middle of the floor, the drum-and-drum duets with Tyler — the theatricality is part of the job description, and he does it without the playing suffering.
Drumeo’s voters gave him Rock Drummer Of The Year in 2025, citing exactly that: high energy, emotionally charged drumming.
Josh Dun’s drum kit
Every album cycle gets its own kit, which is unusual and very deliberate — the drums are part of the visual identity of each record.
- Drums — SJC Custom Drums. A long-running relationship, with a one-off custom kit built for each tour. The Clancy World Tour kit is the current one.
- Cymbals — Zildjian. For the Clancy run he moved to a K Sweet-led setup: 14” hats, 19” and 20” crashes and a big 23” ride, with two A EFX crashes and an EFX stack for the trashy, electronic-sounding accents.
- Heads — Remo, all of it. A Controlled Sound X coated snare batter over an Ambassador Hazy, Powerstroke Clear tom batters over single-ply Ambassador resonants, and a Powerstroke P3 on the kick. That is a controlled, modern, close-miked setup rather than an open one.
- Hardware — DW 9000 series. The standard answer for a rig that gets built and struck three hundred times a year.
- Electronics. Pads and triggers integrated into the kit — the sub-drops and processed snares in the songs come from here.
Every era, with buy links, is on Josh Dun’s Rig Vault page.
Want the sound without the rig?
This is one of the more achievable modern sounds, because it is built on control rather than expensive shells.
Use controlled heads. A Powerstroke-style tom batter with a built-in dampening ring and a coated, reinforced snare head gets you most of the way. Our drum head buying guide covers what those rings actually do.
Then add one pad. A single sample pad next to the hi-hat, loaded with a sub-drop and a clap, changes what a two-piece band can sound like more than any drum will. Our electronic drum kit guide is the starting point, and the Gear Guru will spec a hybrid setup to a budget.
And an EFX crash. Short, trashy, no sustain. It is the sound of every accent in this band’s catalogue.
Where to start listening
- “Heathens” (2016). Restraint, and a snare that lands like a door slamming.
- “Ride” (2015). The reggae-adjacent groove that nobody expected from them.
- “Jumpsuit” (2018). The heaviest thing they have recorded.
- “Overcompensate” (2024). Hybrid drumming as the actual arrangement.
- Any live version of “Trees”. The one where he ends up on the crowd.
Final thoughts
It is easy to under-rate Josh Dun because the parts are not complicated and the band is filed under pop. That misses the job he is actually doing.
Two people, no bass player, a stadium, ninety minutes, and the whole rhythmic weight of the show on one drummer. The right question is not “is this technically difficult” but “could you do it” — and for almost everyone, the answer is no.
See Josh Dun’s full rig in the Rig Vault, or read about Travis Barker — another drummer who made hitting hard into a whole identity.