World’s Youngest Professional Drummer

Julian Pavone, Guinness World Records’ Youngest Professional Drummer, has earned several endorsements, including one from Andy Graham, whose Slaperoo inventions won the California inventor/musician top honors two years in a row at the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) show.

NAMM is the largest music production convention worldwide; each year it lures nearly 100,000 to the Anaheim Convention Center, including 9-year-old Pavone, who at the age of 5 years, 10 months, 3 days was named World’s Youngest Professional Drummer, though he’d begun banging his way to greatness as an infant.

Pavone is a prodigy who has been featured on more than 300 television programs including “The Oprah Winfrey Show” twice and in more than 45,000 newspaper and magazine articles. At NAMM earlier this year Graham was so impressed by Pavone that he gave the youngster a full endorsement for his two Slaperoo musical inventions, the S-100 and “The Noodle,” which won “Best in Show” at NAMM at their 2012 and 2013 debuts, respectively.

Graham’s S-100 and “The Noodle” drew a lot of attention at NAMM, including that of John Mahon, percussionist for Elton John, and India’s renowned percussionist Anandan Sivamani. At the expo, musicians lined up to his Slaperoo Percussion Booth to hammer out rhythms on these unusual instruments.

The S-100 looks like a tall metal rod, but it essentially contains a percussion section inside; the Noodle is its smaller relative, 26 inches long, made of aluminum, weighing less than a pound, and easy to tune. In essence, it’s a small stick that packs a big musical punch.

Graham finds inspiration in the most unlikely of places. For the S-100 he says he was inspired by a large shipping crate with a steel band around it.

“I banged on the strap and thought it could sound great with a pickup on it. The design came to me in a few minutes,” Graham said.

For anyone else that band was probably bound for the trash. For Graham, a new electric percussion instrument was born, followed by its pint-size counterpart some time later.