High school drumline performance is so good it made America’s Got Talent come begging
We normally think of the drumline as simply a subsection of percussionists in a much larger marching band. Sure, they draw our attention and are integral in keeping the beat, but these folks are so talented that they often called on to perform on their own.
Drumlines first entered the mainstream with a 2002 movie starring then-Nickelodian-star Nick Cannon (it was simply called “Drumlines”). After that, people started taking notice of the talented percussionists in their local marching bands and showing more interest in hearing drumming performances. Drumlines became “a thing.”
The next big drumline sensation came in 2011 when an unlikely high school performance went viral.
Five teenagers – Nigel, Dylan, Matt, Elias, and Jordan – entered a talent show at Lake Howell High School in central Florida with a rousing performance that showed off their amazing drumming skills. The boys are all American and the kilts they donned in the video are merely costumes. Nevertheless, they call themselves the “Hot Scots.”
Since it was posted in March of 2011, their killer drumming has been viewed nearly 21 MILLION times! Pretty impressive if you ask us!
The website Drumlines of America caught up with one of the performers, Dylan Charles – who went on to become a snare player for Infinity Percussion – in 2015. He described how the video came to be.
Charles said the Hot Scots was not a name the young men gave themselves. Rather, the Hot Scots drumline had been around at Lake Howell High School since the 1990s. The original group consisted of members Luis Rivera, Ryan Dixon, and Matt Verberg, 3 friends who were lured into a contest by the best prize any teen can get – a day off from school.
“The high school was holding some sort of cultural or ethnic event,” Charles explained. “Apparently if they gave a performance they would get an entire day off of school. Thus the Scottish drummers were born.”
After a few years, the original group petered out, but apparently the legend continued. That’s when Dylan Charles asked his friend Nigel Fernandez if he wanted to help revive it. They then got three other teens involved and brought the “Hot Scots” back to Lake Howell High for the 2011 talent show.
“We just played some of our favorite drum corps excerpts and then Nigel & I filled in the rest,” Charles told Drumlines of America.
The performance was epic (as you can see below) but the members had no idea how many people would end up viewing it after Fernandez put it up on YouTube.
It wasn’t until Fernandez’s mother told him the video was getting thousands of hits within days that they realized they had won more than a high school talent competition.
Then, according to Charles, the show America’s Got Talent came calling and Drumlines of America reported that they “became relentless in contacting them for a potential performance.”
But it appears the boys turned them down (or they couldn’t make it work) because as far as we know, there was only one more Hot Scots performance – this time with just 4 performers. That took place the following year at the 2012 Lake Howell High talent competition (that video has been seen by over a quarter of a million people but never got quite the reception of the first).
Despite appearing in only the first Hot Scots video, Dylan Charles said he still gets recognized from it.
“I always get recognized at percussion competitions now, and every once in a while random people on the street will recognize me too.”
Better yet, all of the young men are still friends.
Scroll down below to see their amazingly in sync and lightening-speed percussion performance.
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