Sina-Drums, the young trailblazing drummer on YouTube
- Music
Sina Döring, also known to the world as sina-drums on her YouTube channel, is a second-year Jazz & Pop student at the ArtEZ Academy of Music in Arnhem. Her YouTube channel, where she uploads a mix of her own drum covers, collaborations, and songs from her original albums, is very successful with over 1.3 million subscribers and upwards of 520 million total video views. She recently collaborated with three other ArtEZ students to write and produce a music video shot entirely in one take.
With over 1.3 million followers, we wondered, what’s the secret to such popularity? Sina says a lot of it was luck. “I started very early on in the game. 9 years ago, there were not that many people on YouTube, especially not girls playing drums.”
More than that, she notes, it’s in showing the details. She uses several different camera angles of her playing in her videos and switches often between each view, offering her audience new insights into the various roles of percussion. If you look at her most popular videos, they are “not the ones with the most difficult songs to learn, but rather the most well-known. Oftentimes people have listened to these songs for years, but they never knew everything the drums were doing.”
“You Won’t Bring Me Down,” one of the videos Sina is most proud of, an original song from her Chi Might III album.
How did it all start?
Sina got started on YouTube when she was 14, uploading drum covers. Her father is also a musician, primarily a guitarist, and it was his idea to create the channel in the first place, “almost 10 years ago,” she adds. “Wow, that’s crazy, but yeah, as a recently turned 14-year-old and with YouTube still a new thing, it wasn’t exactly on my radar then. I feel incredibly lucky to have had musical parents who encouraged me to share my musical side with the world.” YouTube became a place where she could also collaborate digitally, which Sina says was a gift: “I was living in a small village in Germany, yet just by sending some files along, I was able to play with people all over the world, whether in England, Australia, the Netherlands, or elsewhere.”
Jazz & Pop studies
Considering her already well-established platform on YouTube, the decision to start formally studying might seem out of the ordinary at first glance. But it was the right thing for Sina: “I had heard many great things about this course from colleagues, so I had wanted to go here for a long time. And even though I have a decent following online, I feel I still have a lot to learn, especially about playing other genres.” And finally, though she has many online collaborations, she still wants more diverse experiences playing live. Sina: “It’s different when you’re recording a video at home with multiple takes. My study programme here has helped me learn how to learn a piece well from beginning to end in one take.”
The One-Take-Video project
Recently, Sina did a project at ArtEZ where she and 3 other students created and produced a one-take video, involving a total of 20 different musicians. She worked with fourth-year students Nils Neumann and Philip Calisto (both Composition for Film and Theatre), and with Celina von Wrochem, also a Jazz & Pop student. Though the project was always intended to be uploaded to Sina’s YouTube channel, the original idea was not hers. The fourth-year students wanted to do a project before graduating that took advantage of the unique opportunity before them: access to the school’s numerous instruments, building resources and available, capable musicians.
"Trying not to fall on your face"
To create the video, the fourth-years first explored the location, where they took a phone video of the whole space without music, mapping out a choreography. Using that phone video, Nils, Celina, Philip and Sina co-wrote and recorded a song to match it, after which all 20 musicians filmed the final music video over 2 days. It wasn’t always straightforward for the concept team, however. Sina: “Between [me, Nils, Celina and Philip], we had to meet to rehearse about 5-7 times before the dress rehearsal, because the middle segment where we’re walking down the stairs was the most difficult part. You’re doing so many things at once: playing something that’s not your primary instrument, walking down stairs, shouting “hey!”, all while trying not to fall on your face.”
As for any advice for others wanting to follow in the footsteps of the YouTube-drummer, Sina encourages everyone to not give up hope. “I think if you really believe in what you do, at some point things will start working out, but you do have to put in the time and hard work. It’s never too late – really!”
More about the Jazz & Pop course in Arnhem
