Amogh, 17, Passes Rockschool Grade 8 Drums with Distinction
Amogh is seventeen, and in the photograph he sent Trill Route, his music school in Bangalore, he is holding a certificate up to the camera in a T-shirt of the metal band Lamb of God. The certificate reads Grade 8, Drums, Passed with Distinction. It comes from RSL, the London exam board behind the Rockschool grades that rock and pop players take around the world, and Grade 8 is the highest of them. He reached it in March 2026, in an exam recorded on video for an examiner, fourteen months after a Distinction at Grade 7. For most of those months he was also the drummer in Black Noize, a student band formed at the school’s Band Camp.
He is in Class 12, his last year of school, and has learnt drums at Trill Route, a contemporary music school in Indiranagar, since 2022. Band Camp is the school’s programme that forms a group of students into a band. They rehearse for a couple of months, record a song in the school’s studio and shoot a music video for its YouTube channel. Four of Amogh’s performances are on the channel.
How he started
Amogh first sat at a drum kit at ten, after his parents told him he ought to be able to play an instrument and let him choose which. Drums, he says, were the ones that always caught his attention when he listened to music; they had a presence. It did not run in a straight line. The pandemic closed his first classes, and when he picked up the sticks again he had to start over. His family went looking for a new school, and that search brought him to Trill Route. Asked what he enjoys most about playing now, he says it is “the stage presence, scope for creativity and the groove of playing the drums.” He told the story himself in February 2026, in the first episode of Humans of Trill Route, the school’s short interview series.
The bands
The first release with his drumming on it was Black Noize’s recording of Queen’s Somebody to Love, in July 2024. In August 2024 he played for a second Band Camp band, Random Access Memories, on their recording of Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun. That autumn he was recording Grade 7 mock videos and rehearsing with two bands at once. On New Year’s Day 2025 Black Noize released a rock arrangement of JVKE’s Golden Hour, and in December 2025 came Circle With Me by Spiritbox, a fast and heavy metal song, with Amogh at the kit.
What the lessons look like
He started on rock and pop, found Slipknot, and went from there to Metallica and Slayer, and his lessons followed him. By January 2023, four months after he joined Trill Route, he was working through Slipknot’s Duality and the double-kick technique that metal drumming is built on. The song that took longest was The Sound of Muzak, by Porcupine Tree, in an odd time signature. He spent the first half of 2023 on it, learnt to write the drum part out from memory, and played it at a school recital that year. After it came Plini’s Electric Sunrise, Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name, Periphery’s Alpha and Marigold, Toto’s Rosanna for its half-time shuffle, and most recently Caravan, the piece from the film Whiplash.
His teacher, Abhimanyu, introduces a rhythm one week and sends him away with something that uses it. One week it was a mid-tempo shuffle and a few songs to listen to before the next class; another, a drum solo built from linear patterns, in which no two limbs strike at once. Then came a year of the Latin rhythms a working drummer is expected to know, samba, bossa nova, mambo and songo, and after those a Chicago blues shuffle, swing played along to records, and time signatures well beyond four.
The two exams
He took the exams, he says, to have something official to show for his progress, and for the experience of learning a new set of pieces for an examiner. Rockschool exams can be taken on video: the candidate records the whole set and an examiner marks the recording. Early in 2024 the Grade 7 syllabus went onto the schedule, three pieces, Law, Control and Techno, and a set of technical exercises. He recorded mock versions through the year, the last in October, then the exam recording in November, and the result came in January 2025: a Distinction. The examiner picked out two things. The ghost notes under the drum and bass grooves of Law, the quiet strokes between the main beats, were light and relaxed, and the solo in Techno used the whole kit.
Grade 8 began within weeks of that result. He listened through the new pieces at the end of January 2025 and started with Hit Me, a Dirty Loops song, then Meet Darth Ear and Last Time, and then the technical work. The hard part, he says, was “recording the entire performance of all exam pieces in one take without breaks”, and the answer was rigorous practice: full run-throughs recorded as mock videos in September and December 2025, before the exam recording in March 2026. His teacher prepared the pieces with him, corrected mistakes and suggested ideas for the improvised sections.
The Grade 8 report describes “an almost flawless sense of timing” across the three pieces and singles out Meet Darth Ear for the quality of its sound and its accuracy, including the coordination across the kit in its fastest passages. It closes by calling the whole “an impressive performance at Grade 8”. The result, Amogh wrote, left him “happy and excited”, and proud of the work that had gone into it.
Congratulations, Amogh - Grade 8 with Distinction, and the drum chair in Black Noize.
What comes next
School comes first this year: the entrance exams for a degree in biology or biotechnology. Music, he says, will wait for college to settle, and after that he would like to work in studios, playing on other people’s songs. In the Humans of Trill Route interview he was asked for advice for anyone starting out. You have to genuinely like what you are doing, he said, because that is what makes you want to know more, and to keep practising when it gets hard. Closer at hand, he wants to learn guitar and keyboard. The drummer he would most like to jam with is Eloy Casagrande, the Brazilian who now plays for Slipknot.
Drum lessons at Trill Route are one to one at the centre in Indiranagar, and there is a guide to choosing a drum teacher for anyone starting out. Drum lessons at Trill Route
Comments