dopaminergic

🔝Where to start & Recommended listening:

Viral 🔥 Latest Release 🆕 Personal Favorites 😍 Intro to Beatpella ✨

🔜Upcoming events:

🔹Mon. Dec 29: Wing & Hiss on MBC Broadcast Entertainment Awards 🔹Weds. Dec 31: Beatpella House on MBC Gayo Daejejeon 2025

🔹Full Official Schedule🔹

📆 Master Events Index

🗨️ Master Translations Index

🎮Beatbox Games

✨An incomplete collection of personal favorites

🤓☝️Member Profiles & Fun Facts

Wing 🔹 Hiss 🔹Yella.E 🔹Hellcat 🔹Huckle

🎤🥊Competitions, Beatbox Battles

Coming soon!

✨Recommended Fan Content:

🔹 Val: "my fave beatpella house moments" <- my fave of all time, also wing himself liked & commented. extremely funny val's sense of humor is unmatched 🔹 DongDong: "Iconic Beatpella House Moments" <- literal iconic fan compilation idk what to say. Dongdong my beloved u are an angel to me 😭 also: "Wing funny moments" & "Wing funny moments 2" & my fave: "Wing's ceremony moments" <- (if you know you know)

📍Official Socials:

Beatpella House: Main Site🔹Naver Fancafe🔹Youtube 🔹Instagram 🔹Twitter 🔹TikTok Wing: Youtube 🔹Instagram 🔹Twitter Hiss: Youtube 🔹Instagram 🔹Twitter 🔹 TikTok Huckle: Youtube 🔹Instagram 🔹Twitter Hellcat: Youtube (afaik he uses the jackpot official youtube) 🔹Instagram 🔹Twitter Yella.e: Youtube 🔹Instagram 🔹 TikTok

🔹 One final disclaimer:

All translations with the tag #mytrans are my own. I will never, ever use AI or any other machine translation.

I believe that representing someone else's words in a faithful, accurate way is a serious responsibility. Any time I don't think I can do justice to what was truly said, I would rather leave it to someone better at the language, or myself in the future when my ability has improved enough to come back to it and share something I know is as close to correct as possible. I practice every day to continue improving in order to be able to achieve this.

This essay is an extension of my dissatisfaction with the 5 traditional judging categories. Similar to my breakdown of what makes a beatboxer objectively good, I want to further break down what makes people unique in beatboxing. I’m going to argue that originality in beatboxing is a function of proficiency, preference, and ingenuity (and let me further explain what I mean by this). Let me roughly define proficiency as mastery over sounds and patterns in terms of execution- timing, dynamics, clarity, and pitch if applicable. This is mainly in terms of quality, but not exclusive to quantity (knowing many techniques can be helpful). I’m using the word ingenuity in the sense of the ability to create new sounds or patterns. Preference is what drives the choices behind a beatboxer’s performance. What genre of music should their song invoke? Where should they put this pattern? Does a sound feel like it naturally fits into their performance? In that sense, proficiency, preference, and ingenuity all come from experience. You cannot become proficient without practice. You cannot have a preference without experiencing something and determining that you like or dislike it. You cannot have ingenuity without either accident (experience creating art) or inspiration (experience consuming art).

I’ll first discuss proficiency and its relationship to originality. Sometimes, your average beatboxer will be able to do the same sounds and patterns as a world champion beatboxer. What separates them is the level of execution- at a higher level there will be more control over volume, clarity, speed etc. Beyond mastery of using sounds together, some beatboxers have achieved unrivaled mastery over a single sound. Often, they will have variations of sounds that they pioneer/popularize named after them (D-low’s inward bass, Codfish’s liproll, Slizzer bass, etc). While oftentimes the sounds are not invented by these people, the textures they create with their variation of the sound often will be unique. I’ll put an example below.

King Inertia is well known in the community for his Inward Bass (a sound that is achieved by breathing inwards while vibrating the vocal folds). This creates a growly texture, but when refined to a high enough level, can create room shaking sub-bass frequencies. Just watch him perform and at 1:50 in the video the camera literally shakes from how deep his inward bass goes. People can copy his style. Some people have a similar reliance on inward bass and use the same drums as him. But it’s hard to copy the richness of the texture, and the few people who have mastered inward bass at as high of a level have their own variations they specialize in.

Preference also naturally drives an artist’s stylistic choices. This can be in multiple ways, but I’ll start with genre. To carry on the example from above, KI (King Inertia) often uses inward bass to add to his melodies, and he often takes inspiration from hip-hop and trap music in his beats. I briefly mentioned above that there were a few others who have a high level inward bass, and one of the other big names is Vocodah. Vocodah and KI, both being from the US, have trained together and battled against each other many times. Vocodah, however, sounds unique in a completely different way from KI. He often layers inward bass with other sounds, whether it be gasping, whistles and laser sounds, or some form of tongue rolling. Vocodah is much more influenced by EDM music, especially genres like brostep and riddim. Such genres are heavy on grittier and darker textures. I'll put another example of genre influences in style below, but this time it'll be a different example than Vocodah.

Patbox is a French Ivorian beatboxer who’s been gaining some recent traction, winning several battles and getting 2nd at the 2025 French Beatbox Championship. It doesn’t sound that crazy to be 2nd in a country but the French scene is so strong that his opponent in the finals was the 2025 GBB champion, Pacmax. To reiterate, GBB is the highest level battle in the world. Before I nerd out even more about titles and battles, I want to highlight his unique style. Most of his sounds are quite common in the global scene, and especially the French scene. However, Patbox uses them in refreshing ways packaged in genres that were less common in the community (at the time, he sort of helped set off a trend). Almost nobody beatboxes Afrobeats like Patbox. Personally I’m not too familiar with the family of genres so please do clown me if I get something wrong, but a good chunk of the song is Baile Funk. He’s clearly super comfortable in the genre, playing around with melodies, beat patterns, and textures to make it interesting and keep it fresh. Beyond genre, there’s usage of sound. Do you like using a given sound sparingly and impactfully or more recurring and sustained? A beatboxer might use a sound for drops while another uses that same sound in their intros and prefers other sounds for drops. These are all driven by preference.

Ingenuity is simultaneously an easy and difficult way to sound unique. It quite literally takes inventing a new sound or technique. Similar to named variations of sounds, some sounds are named after the people who invented (or at least popularized) them. Examples include the Calexy whistle, the Beat Rhino snare, the Zede scratch, and many many more. 

Dharni is the only 2x Grand Beatbox Solo Champion in history, winning 2013 and 2014 back to back. He sounds like no one else simply because no one else does the sounds he does. He’s invented a plethora of techniques that he uses in his showcase here, from his unique vocal bass/filter, to his unique water drop sound, to his echo effects. Even if someone else were to copy everything that he did, it wouldn’t change the fact that he set the precedent.

Wing - Attention

Wing has been getting a lot of attention (heh) lately due to a combination of his music videos, short form content, and recent performance at the 2025 Grand Beatbox Battle (basically the world championships). Despite his more recent success, he’s been in the community for a long time notably winning the South Korean Championship in 2017 and Asian Championship in 2018. This video, a cover of Charlie Puth’s Attention, was his submission to the 2018 Grand Beatbox Battle (GBB). Unfortunately it ranked just below the cutoff, and he was unable to compete that year.

While this performance excels in many aspects, I want to highlight two things. First is his clarity/cleanliness. Wing has always been one of the cleanest in the game, and this earlier example of his beatboxing shows that it’s something he’s never lacked. Each sound is concise; there’s no extra air or indication that he’s straining himself to reach a frequency or a pitch. Each sound is also consistent; if it wasn’t caught on video one could imagine they were generated by pressing buttons on a drum machine. Clarity, along with power and speed are great indicators of a beatboxer’s level of control over their beatboxing. While Wing certainly doesn’t lack in power or speed, his sheer cleanliness makes him one of the best in the game.

The second thing I want to highlight about this performance is its structure. While musical structure can be more subjective and varied depending on what ideas the musician wants to convey, there’s still a way to do it. I’m not versed in music theory nor am I a professional songwriter so forgive me if I sound amateurish here, but Wing does at least construct a piece with solid structure. He starts by introducing Attention’s melody in the form of humming with a basic/quiet beat. He then picks up in energy with a simple drum buildup while singing the lyrics, transitioning with a quick filter effect into a bassy and groovy drop. He keeps it fresh by having plenty of variations of different sounds and drum patterns, then moves onto a second drum buildup that removes the melody. His second drop is less melody heavy but introduces new drum textures and as a bonus he throws in his signature w-w-wing sound. In the end, he starts to close out with the opening humming beat but fakes it out by reiterating the first drop, and then does a true ending with the humming he started with. In summary, he follows a basic beatbox track structure- intro, buildup, drop, second buildup, second drop, then conclusion, but explaining how he does it so masterfully in more detail would ramp up the word count and I’ve got things to do so I’ll leave it at that.

Osis - Cash

Osis is an Irish/Latvian beatboxer. An absolute powerhouse of a beatboxer, Osis won the 2022 Online World Beatbox Championship, and scored second at the Grand Beatbox Battle 2024. Cash was his video submission to the 2024 Grand Beatbox Battle, scoring first place amongst the video submissions and earning him a spot in the battle (where he went on to get second as I previously mentioned).

If Wing makes his beatboxing look easy, Osis is the exact opposite. If you compare their visuals across the two videos, Wing looks like he’s vibing and Osis looks like he’s in physical pain. But don’t mistake this as me putting down Osis; while Wing gets aura from his effortless groove, Osis’s performance is impressive from him being locked the fuck in. How? First is his use of dynamics, specifically power. While Cash has audio mastering, it can’t hide the sheer loudness behind Osis’s sounds. His kicks sound like explosions and his snares sound sharper than an axe splitting logs. The vocal effect he puts on his first “money in cash” is a sound called vibration bass, a sound that’s notorious in the community for being inconsistent and quiet (for example, Wing has noted several times that he’s sometimes unhappy with how his comes out). Yet Osis pushes it to balance out with his drums.

Cash isn’t necessarily the best example of sheer power in beatboxing (see the person who beat Osis in the finals of GBB24, Julard), but it’s a great example of power with the second category I want to highlight- texture variety. To create the sub bass frequencies, instead of relying on one sound he uses five. He has two vocal basses (vibration & inward bass), one created by the lips (liproll), one created by the tongue (sub clickroll), and then one which is one of his signature sounds which I kid you not is a lip oscillation (buzzing your lips) layered with polyphonic singing (singing 2 notes at the same time) layered with a whistle. Beatboxers are freaks. For higher pitched frequencies, he has his polyphonic singing and his aforementioned signature sound. He also uses a variety of different drums and poppy sound effects with different textures to keep things fresh. In a way, the variety he shows in his frequencies is its own form of complexity- but I’ll get to that some other day.

Zer0 - 2021 Kickback Wildcard

If you ask a beatboxer who in the community has the best drums of all time, there’s several names that come up. Alem, the 2015 world champion. Colaps, the 2021 GBB champion. But there’s one name that gets thrown in the conversation despite how few live events he’s attended. That would be Zer0, from Azerbaijan. While his location and finances made it difficult for him to battle on the big stage, he rampaged the online scene throughout the 2010s and throughout the pandemic years. Notable achievements include winning the 2020 online (read: pandemic) edition of GBB, and winning way too many online battles to count. He’s currently a full time surgeon, so he’s not as active in the scene anymore but the occasions when he pops back in are always something to behold. This video was his submission to an online battle called the Kickback Beatbox Battle in 2021, which didn’t actually make it in for reasons I forget.

One of the main reasons that Zer0 is one of the contenders for greatest drums of all time in the beatbox scene is his speed. Throughout the video there are plenty of parts where he leaves space between his beats to not overcomplicate things. Even still, he will add throwaway flourishes that show off how fast he can go even in a low energy, casual beat. When he picks up the pace and energy, he goes even faster (see the portion from 1:00-1:20). 

The second category I want to highlight in this track is dynamics again. While for Osis I highlighted the aspect of loudness and power, I want to show off another aspect of dynamics- control. In the section starting from the 1:20 mark of the video, Zer0 does a beat with his mouth entirely closed, creating a filter effect that mimics hearing loud music muffled behind a wall, as if you were in the bathroom at a party. Let me be honest here. That’s cool as fuck, and the beat goes unreasonably hard. While Cash turns up the volume as high as possible to show off how powerful Osis is as a beatboxer, Zer0 plays with the dial, choosing to turn the volume down at a key point to create an amazing moment in his piece.

Bizkit - Don’t Speak

I love my local/national community too much to just not include an American as an example of Good Beatboxing™. And what is a more relevant example of an American Good Beatboxer™ than the current US Champ, Bizkit. Throughout 2025 he saw a string of victories, from getting 2nd at Vokal Total, a high level European Battle, to 1st at the New York Championships, then 1st at the USA Championships. Unfortunately since the 2025 USA Championships happened in December, the videos haven’t been released yet and I have to use his 2024 performance (in which he got second place). The part I will focus on is his second round from his top 16 battle against Brody, another American beatboxer (5:03-6:33).

Bizkit excels at a lot, and I wish I could break down everything I like about this song or his style in general but I have to get this out before midnight EST or my other Friday effort poster friends will make fun of me. Since this video is a live performance unlike the others I want to highlight his stage presence. First, his little “wow look, they know my lyrics” quip is a response to his opponent bragging “watch how they know my lyrics” in the previous round. Second, as a dancer (yes he’s also a dancer), he’s completely in tune with moving his body along to the beat, moving his arms to emphasize his lyrics, bouncing his body real low when he brings the beat low at 5:27, and doing a little sassy walk at 5:49 during his second buildup. He also engages the crowd, making clapping motions when he wants the crowd to clap along, and having them sing along to his lyrics as mentioned before. I was there to see it live and the "hey" chant was electrifying.

I also want to point out his control over pitch. The entire song follows the blues scale in D (Music theory nerds please clown me if I say something wack or wrong here, I need to be punished for my hubris), and if you listen real close, you’ll notice that every single one of his non drum sounds stays on the scale and/or follows the melody he introduces in the beginning. This allows him to keep the audience engaged by hooking them on a familiar melody throughout the piece while introducing new textures with every new sound. Yes he has good structure, yes he has great variety in textures/frequencies, but part of the reason he’s able to maintain his structure with his varied frequencies is how he keeps hammering the main melody home no matter how many times he changes up everything else.