Right, left, right, left, right, left.

As simple as it sounds, speed drumming is not as easy as it looks.

“All I’m thinking about is really concentrating on the sound of the pad because when you’re going really fast sometimes you’ll start to play in unison,” said Tom Grosset while demonstrating at home in Etobicoke.

Get caught in a rhythm where both your drumsticks touch the pad at exactly the same time and you’ll lose precious stroke counts — in a 60-second competition where strokes are everything. Keep that up and you’ll never catch Grosset, who at age 22 is the newly minted world’s fastest speed drummer.

He earned the title at the World’s Fastest Drummer finals (a self-described extreme sport event) in Nashville, Tenn., on July 13.

In the lead-up to the competition, Grosset practised an hour a day, every day for the past seven years, all for the honour of being dubbed speediest, with a stroke count of 1,208 in exactly one minute.

Five single strokes are all that separate Grosset from the world’s former speediest drummer, Mike Mangini.

“I still can’t believe it,” Grosset said.

Grosset made multiple 60-second attempts during this year’s competition to beat the record, but it wasn’t until his eighth try that he succeeded.

With a quick stretch of his forearms ahead of time, Grosset said he focused primarily on his breathing.

His first stroke set off the drumometer, an electronic device that counts drum strokes in a set period of time, which immediately began counting down to zero.

For 60 seconds, Grosset said, he tuned everyone out, kept focused and managed to keep his arms just tense enough to avoid the fatal conjoining of strokes, drumming his way to a new world record.

Grosset is the only Canadian ever to win the title of fastest hands. The only other Canadian to win a comparable victory at the WFD finals was Mike Mallais, who currently holds the record for fastest feet after a performance in 2007.

Sitting at his drum set in his living room, Grosset pre-emptively warned that a demonstration of his skills wouldn’t be nearly as impressive as his winning performance, since he’s taking a bit of a speed drumming break these days.

After years spent working to achieve speed-related goals that started with some innocent Googling about drums and ended in a world record, the Humber College music graduate is slowing things down a notch.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

This summer, Grosset said, he plans to focus on making melodies with a full drum set as part of the jazz fusion band Snaggle.

“People are going to automatically assume that I’m a speed drummer, a metal head . . . that’s not true,” he said. “I’m just trying to improve as a musician.”