Avik Roy

Avik Roy has been drumming for close to 15 years. Self-taught at first, he played drums in college (Hampshire College, USA) during various recitals while pursuing his Liberal Arts degree which included a minor In Music. He topped his class at the University of Massachusetts (a consortium to Hampshire) in the Music Theory 101 exam, and it is here that he learnt songwriting and gained the ability to compose individually. During his summers back in India, he founded and taught the drums at the Salaam Baalak Trust Sound School.

On his return to India in 2013, Avik joined the One World College of Music and continued to learn under notable drummer Rueben Narain. After playing with a few bands during this period, In 2018 he founded and launched Purple Penchant featuring vocalist Bhanu Sharma. They launched their first single, Gotta Say The News, in 2019 and have since released 2 further singles and are working on an EP scheduled to come out later this year.

Avik is also a member of the Lilanoor Ensemble; a group of 4 actor musicians who performed their first show, Buried Treasures, in February of 2020. The Ensemble also did a series of fundraisers during the second covid wave in early 2021, helping raise over 6.5 lakhs for covid relief. They have since released 3 singles and have several upcoming releases planned for the coming years.

Compositionally, Avik has written and arranged the music for Purple Penchants first three singles. He also did the soundtrack for a solo theatrical performance, Gurudakshina, that was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2017 as well as the Mountain Echoes Festival in Bhutan in 2018. He has composed, mixed and mastered the music for the online podcast series; Kabir: Voice of Love, which is a series of 31 dohas that has been released on all audio streaming platforms.

Over the last couple years, Avik has dived deep into learning and enhancing his technique on the drums. Currently, he is studying under drum guru, Bruce Becker, a prodigy of Freddie Gruber who is a technical maestro and has taught the likes of Dave Weckl, David Girabaldi, Steve Smith and others. He has also learnt Konnakol under Mridangam maestro, B.C. Manjunath.