I purchased my first drum set from a friend in Highschool for $300. The month was April, the year was 1997 and I had $200 in my wallet — But I needed another $100 quick. Luckily the April thaw was beginning, and Mark Howitt (my best friend at the time, and co-founder of my first musical endevour) noticed a $100 bill discarded in the receding snow bank at the end of my driveway. Now, being 16 and being unsurprisingly broke, I found it unbelievable that he handed the money straight over to me and said: "Now you can buy that drum set". That is defintely one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me. Mark was a true friend, that's for sure.

I purchased the drum set at the end of that week, and lugged it home (much to my parent's dismay). The set was a 5-piece Westbury kit, with a 16" Paiste crash cymbal, the factory Westbury ride, and a pair of gut wrenchingly awful sounding unbranded hihats. The vinyl on the drumset was warped as well, and all the skins were toast (apart from the nice Ambassador Coated Remo on the snare drum). Did I mention the kick pedal was broken, and the crash cymbal had a chunk taken out of it? I didn't really care at the time though — I had a drum set.

Mark and I decided to start the band we had been talking about for months prior to the purchase. Mark purchased himself a Bass Guitar, and we got another highschool friend Ryan Weaver interested who had been playing guitar for a year or two already. We started out jamming a couple of times a week, trying to learn some of our favourite band's songs and hone our skills. I was still terrible at keeping time, and we all had to learn how to play in sync with each other. We decided to call our band Reign (an uninspiring name to say the least), and after months and months of learning some popular songs, we decided we'd take a stab at creating our own songs. At this point we had signed up for a Battle of the Bands concert at Duncan McIntosh arena in Cambridge, Ontario but we needed another guitarist. We pulled Tim Boughton on board (another good friend from highschool) and jammed for another few months until the show. I'm not going to go into detail about the show, as it was horrible. Although, it is notable to say that a raw pig heart was brought on stage, which our lead singer took a bites out of and spit into the crowd. We were nicknamed "The Pig Heart Band" for years after.

In 1998 we decided to drop our lead singer, and Tim took over that role as well as Rhythm Guitar. Ryan stayed with Lead Guitar, Mark stayed on bass and I (of course) kept on drumming. During that epic failure of a gig, I had my first taste of Double Bass... and I loved it! I was obsessed with it even. I purchased a brand new Pearl Double Kick Pedal from Drummer's Choice in Brampton, as well as a new 16" Zildjian Avedis Crash to replace my shattered Paiste crash. Over the next year I replaced the hihats with a nice pair of Zildjian 14" Rock Hats (They're still my favourite sounding hat as of yet), a 15" Zildjian Thin Crash, and my very favourite 18" Zildjian Oriental China Trash. I loved that cymbal, and over used it to death (of course). By the time I had re-skinned my drums, and brought everything up to par, the rest of the band had also done the same. We all now had decent equipment, and were starting to play tight. Just when we thought we had it all figured out, Mark decided to move to Sudbury. I was depressed for awhile after that. We continued our work though.

We created 5 original songs, and set out to record a studio album (with what little money we had) in 1999. By this time we had decided to change our name (as Reign was ugly and very common) to Drakkcoil. I forget where Tim got the inspiration for the name, but I loved it. We entered "Fusion", which was a music festival held by our highschool at the time, but we still needed bassist. I asked a good friend of mine Matt Brown to help us out, and he agreed. He had a strong background in guitar, and picked up the bass with ease. We went to a small recording studio in town (K & S Studios) and cut the drum tracks for our disc. We spent the next month or two recording the guitar tracks and vocal tracks at Tim's house on his computer (an AMD K6-2 400MHz at that time if I'm not mistaken... blazingly fast!) using CoolEdit Pro (now Adobe Audition). During the process of recording the album, we ran into some problems with our Rhythm guitarist, so we said goodbye. Tim finished up the Lead Guitar tracks, and we finished the album. And to be honest, it sounded great considering the money constraints we had.

During the time we finished our "demo album", MP3.com was offering a payment program for each unique listen that your album got. Naturally, we uploaded our album to the site and surprisingly we started getting a lot of listens and our song "The Black Flame" made it all the way to #1 on the chart for 3-4 weeks straight. Another song on the album "Discede" also made the cut and ended up somewhere around #10 or so. Our band name started to show up on Google searches and our album got a short review by Audiogalaxy, and was featured on a few different music websites around the internet. Our profile is still up on Garageband.com years later, and you can find most of our songs scattered around the internet available for download.

After the recording, Matt Brown decided to move to a more suitable home as Lead Guitarist, and we brought in a very talented bass guitarist named Jason Gusz. During the next year or so, we continued to write new songs and we were all getting better and more technical as time went on. Unforunately due to after highschool commitments, and life issues Drakkcoil went defunct. We never released the new material for our next album "Ashes of Gehenna", but in the year 2009 I hope to re-group some of the old members and record the album.

In 2004 I had decided to go to College, but I needed a few extra thousand dollars to pay for the year. I came up with the idea of selling my drum set, and in what was later one of my most regrettable moves, I did indeed sell it to a friend later that year. Now that I didn't have drums, I dropped out of the scene all together but still played whenever I had the chance. At one point in 2006 we rented a drum set from a local music store to jam in an old garage shop on the edge of town. However, not all was lost because in 2008 I realized I was still obsessed with drumming, so I purchased a Tama Swingstar kit and over the next 2 months purchased an array of cymbals and hardware to compliment the kit.

I think this kit will be with me for awhile.