Cobus Potgieter

By Waldo The Squid Published October 22, 2009

AGE 22

GEAR Tama drums, uDrum snare, Gibraltar rack, Pearl hi-hat stand, DW pedals, Evans and Remo heads, Paiste cymbals, Zildjian and Vic Firth sticks, Roland electronics.

CONTACT cobuspotgieter.com

Black Eyed Peas? Avenged Sevenfold? Jonas Brothers?! It’s all fodder for Cobus Potgieter to exercise his exacting chops. Just YouTube him and you’ll find dozens of videos of this unassuming South African matching the drummers note for note on a huge cross-section of trendy pop, metal, and R&B tunes (his interpretation of Kelly Clarkson’s “My Life Would Suck Without You” has gotten 120,000 hits). These are not covers, but aggressively embellished versions of parts that you’ll swear improve the songs. Potgieters’ vids are all professionally done in his home studio — no jokey banter, no distracting cuts or fade-aways, just inviting three- and four-minute spots of a musician at work. iPod-friendly as his selections are, the songs are chosen for their challenging parts or merely because they’re a blast to drum to. Unbelievably, he’s never been in a band, but an instructional DVD is in the works. This Afrikaner’s got it going on.