 Today marks the five-year anniversary of the Drum History podcast. It has gone by fast and been one of the best experiences of my entire life. I mean, it has been so incredible to get to meet so many of you guys and do these shows pretty much every week. Here and now, I'll miss one, but truly it's just been an amazing experience. And I'm going to talk more about the whole, you know, what it's been like over the years in a second. But before I do that, I want to mention something that I want to do to commemorate the five-year anniversary. That would involve you guys. So what I would love to do, and I've had a few people do this over the years and send me clips. But what I want to do is have you guys listening to the show, send me a video. Doesn't matter how good the quality or the audio or anything like that, but send me a video of you playing the intro music to the podcast, which I'll play right now just so you can hear it. Okay, you guys have heard it a lot because of this. By the way, it's not me playing that. It was like, you know, from a stock music website, which I wish it was me playing it, but it sounds awesome. So anyway, what I want to do is you guys send me a version of you playing that. Like I said, quality doesn't matter. Audio doesn't matter. But it'd be cool if it sounded really good, if it looked really good, if you had a really creative way of doing it and a certain cool creative place, something a little bit different that'll go further. I mean, I'm going to include all of them. I think in this, what I'm about to talk about, I want to put these into a video where I don't know how long it'll be. We'll see, but I plan to include all of them. What you'll do is send me a video, you playing the intro, email it to me at the email address will be drummingwithbart1 at gmail.com. That's drummingwithbart, B-A-R-T-1 at gmail.com. That's like a different email I used to use. I just want to keep it clean and separate from my normal podcast email so I don't get things mixed up. So email me there, clip of you playing. I will then put together a huge montage and put it on YouTube, probably within the next, I'd say 30 days or so. But let's just give it a timeline. So today, when this is released, it's going to be October 24th, 2023. You will have until November 7th, 2023 to send me a clip. So November 7th, 2023. After that, I'm going to cut it off and I'm going to start editing it. But what I want to do is make a huge montage. And like I said, if you do something really, really cool, that's even better and I'll put it earlier in the video. I mean, it'd be cool to get some from like, if you're a famous drummer in a band and you happen to listen to the podcast, you should do it too because that'd be awesome to see what people come up with. So anyway, do that. You have until November 7th, 2023. I'll put all these clips together of kind of the best drum history podcast intro performances and I'll put it up on YouTube and maybe my favorite two or three or four or five of them, I'll send you a sticker or something like that. But and if you're from like somewhere outside of the US, which you know, a lot of you are, tell me what country you're from. Put your name and all that stuff. So anyway, all that being said, send me your clips. It'll be awesome. So just a little bit about this process, like I said, it has been amazing to do this podcast. I've met so many great people who are truly friends. It is tons of work. I don't want to under represent how much work a podcast is that gets to a certain point where people really listen and you want to keep the quality up. Like I'll just say everything's fun for the first like, you know, six months. But then after that, it becomes really more of like, okay, you got to make this work and you got to keep it going, which having advertisers and making some money when you do it along the way to help supplement the time you put into it does make it possible. So if you hear advertising on the show, that's seriously what is allowing me to keep going five years in. But so really even on that note, the people who have advertised on the show, which I don't want to name names because there's been a ton of them, but it's been amazing and it's really cool to work with people and have them support me and then get to know them and then see them at drum shows and stuff. It's awesome. So just a really cool experience. If anyone out there is thinking about starting their own podcast or their own YouTube channel, I would say just do it. It is like I said, it's really, really fun and then it becomes a lot of work, but it still maintains being fun because you get to do all this stuff. But you know, there's Friday nights and Saturdays where you're still working on stuff and Sunday night where you're pulling your hair out trying to get it ready and get finished. But again, best experience of my life outside of kids and getting married and all that stuff, but really kind of my cool drum thing that I've done in my life. So I don't think I talk about it much on the podcast because sometimes people just have found me on YouTube, which the kind of numbers side of things have been really cool because it's grown a lot. So Instagram is now at since I started, I mean everything was at zero, but now Instagram is at 90,000 followers, 90.4 or something. Facebook's at about 17,000 followers. YouTube has been a big focus recently and that's at about 10,500 subscribers at the time of recording this. You get addicted to kind of growing the numbers and checking them and really making things go up like about 25,000 downloads of the audio only podcast are streamed per month on like Spotify and Apple, excluding YouTube and all that stuff. So it's just really cool to strike a chord with the community and have you guys like it. And the answering of emails and communication and stuff has truly as I've had small kids and different jobs and stuff, which has been a recent problem. I'll say I've kind of gotten bad about answering people's emails, which I feel terrible about, but I started a different job recently, which scheduling has gotten tough because I used to do them at like two in the afternoon whenever and it would work out, but that's just gotten different. So I guess kind of a thing to talk about now would be what's up next for the podcast. I have no intention of it ending anytime soon or even really changing the layout or format or anything. The gear episodes like the Lars episode and Neil Peart and John Denzmore and there's a bunch of them have always done really, really well. John Bonham is still the number one gear episode or any episode really on YouTube. So I'm going to do more of them very soon. There will be a Tony Williams, like mega episode with Paul Wells that will be coming out soon in the works beyond that are your normal history episodes, but I'm also going to do working on Alex Van Halen, which will be cool Travis Barker gear episode, which will be really neat, but these things all take time. Everything takes time and scheduling is hard. So just hang in there. Some weeks there may be an old episode released instead, but I actually think that's kind of cool because there's a lot of people five years in, I'll say one of the benefits of being around for so long is that like when you have 220 episodes plus, you know, whatever we're at now, I can go back and release like episode 17 and a lot of people haven't heard it. And if you have heard it, the cool thing about the show is that maybe that's something where you could use a refresher on whatever episode 16, 17, 18 and lower are because like I look back at these 70s and 80s and 90s in episode count. Now you I don't forget them, but I just need a little refresher on like, oh, that was an awesome episode or something like that. So if I'm kind of forgetting which was which then you guys may as well. So it's cool to have that ability where my wife is pregnant right now, I will say so our third and final kid will be arriving in January three boys and that'll be it. That'll be the last after that. That's no more, but so it's just nuts right now. But anyway, the podcast will continue. Everything will keep going. I'm hoping to hit 100,000 Instagram followers in the next, you know, a couple months. That'll be really cool. Subscribing on YouTube is huge. If you're if you're watching this, it's kind of a very common thing that I'm guilty of too. But if you're on YouTube, it would be awesome if you subscribed as well or wherever you listen, just follow and subscribe. That actually does really help. If you're a business that wants to reach drummers and my show is a good way to do it. So I'll plug that a little bit now. There's merch. That's also cool to support. You can get like here's a hat. You can get hats and stuff. T-shirts, which I wear my drum history shirt pretty much all the time, which is really cool. So anyway, all that being said, I just really appreciate you guys for supporting me for the last five years, which is pretty crazy. It's a long time, like I said, but it's gone by fast. And here's to another five or 10 years. There's no shortage of episodes. I have so many episode suggestions, which I love getting from you guys. And it's always cool. Sometimes I have to say like, that's a really good idea, but it, you know, how do you get an hour out of that? I've kind of learned to really like step up the like, I feel like once you hit a certain point and threshold you guys who are listening and watching expect a certain level of like quality, which I hope I deliver on and I've had a few or some people will say this wasn't great or they're all good, but there's been a few or say this is kind of a stretch and I get it. I think I understand what people are looking for more. So anyway, more of the high quality stuff on the way. So keep sending me your ideas. But okay, so as we wrap up remember, send me a clip of you playing the drum history podcast intro, the music you hear at the beginning. It's pretty short. It can be you don't need to worry about how great you sound playing. It's like the quality of your performance. The audio should be decent. I mean, you can use your cell phone or whatever and then the video as good as you can get. But like I said, if you have like, you know, I want to see some crazy ones. That'd be awesome. Like if you play with an orchestra playing an awesome, you know, venue or something, whatever, it can be it can be anything, but it'd be cool to get some some kind of neat unique ones there. So email those, the video and the audio synced send it to me together. I don't really want to sync a bunch of video and audio to send like the finished thing. If you color it, whatever if it's cell phone, that's fine drumming with Bart one at gmail.com. That email will keep things separate and it will be all clean and I'll get everything. So that's it for this week. I have a cool one coming up next week. That's a little bit different that I think you guys like, but I just wanted to kind of do a state of the union episode for five years and and thank, you know, everyone who's been involved. We've lost a decent amount of people who I've interviewed over the years. There's a lot of people who are no longer with us. Barry James was recent. Dom Fomularo was recent. Jeremy Berman, that was a crazy one because he was on and it was kind of one of the last times people saw and heard him before he passed away. So it's it's pretty incredible, but I appreciate you guys listening and supporting this show. If you just found me or if you've listened to every single episode since day one, which I know a lot of you guys have. So thank you for listening. It means a lot to me and so honored to be, you know, something that you guys look forward to listening each week and watching on YouTube and, you know, share it with a friend and tell your drummer friends that they should check out drum history and it really helps the show. So thank you guys and I will see you next week.