Web Video / The 8-Bit Drummer

That face when Megan is about to be played.

The8BitDrummer, real name Jerod Collins, is a Twitch streamer and YouTuber who specializes in performing live, high-energy drum covers of miscellaneous video game songs (and the occasional meme song). He also does the occasional gaming stream as a variety channel, covering both modern games such as Tetris 99, Fall Guys, Guilty Gear -STRIVE- and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as well as retro games such as Super Mario 64 and Super Mario World. As of April 2022, he revealed his "8-Bit Bunny" Vtuber Avatar for his gaming streams.

In addition, Jerod joins ProtonJon, Tom Fawkes, and Stephen Georg on the Disc Only Podcast, airing on Jon's channel.

---

The8BitDrummer's streams contain examples of:

• 420, Blaze It: Jerod has a bit cheer for 420, featuring Homestuck's Game Bro magazine, with the title edited to instead read "Drum Bro" with Jerod posing on the cover.
• Actually Pretty Funny: While talking about phones, a viewer quipped 'If you want to hear some more music, please press 1.' They were promptly timed out by a mod on the grounds of trying to hurry Jerod up (an act that is established to be against the rules, though the chatter admitted this was intended to be a joke and not an actual nudge), but he found the line so funny, he overruled the time-out. He does not ask for a time-out to be undone often.
• Affectionate Gesture to the Head: He has an emote of a hand petting a rabbit. He also gives headpats to the plushes at his drum kit if asked to by a viewer.
• Animation Bump: While his normal YouTube highlights are covers from his streams with fades at the beginning and end and an animated stinger, his highlight compilations he used to release were edited by professional, freelance editor and fellow streamer, HyperCole64. As a result, they include a lot more text edits, zooms, sound effects, cuts and added images.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • Since song requests are added to a website where Jerod cannot see who uploaded it, more than a few people request songs that end up being something else, mostly SiIvaGunner or other "ripping" channels.
  • When Jerod was asked for his opinion on the then-rampant controversy for the Pokémon Sword and Shield dex cut, his response was to laugh as if he'd been waiting to vent reams of frustrations about it, put on the track "sans." from Undertale, then hype up what appeared to be a very long rant:
    Jerod: Here's my opinion on the Pokémon Sword and Shield controversy...
    (Abruptly stops the music)
    Jerod: It's freakin' stupid. Let's move on.
  • During one memorable moment on stream, Jerod played Blend S-tretch, a video made by a viewer. It starts with the beginning of the Blend-S anime opening theme, and then 5 seconds in, a clip of Jerod saying "Stretch break UwU!!!" plays and the song switches over to an arrangement of Accumula Town from Pokémon Black and White in the style of said anime. At this point, Jerod keeled over, laughing for about a minute.
    Jerod: Every now and then, I just get assaulted by my own voice on stream and it's always funny!
• Be Careful What You Wish For: In one stream titled "I'm looking for a Drummer", he named the stream after tweeting out that he was looking for more cute Pokémon art on his Twitter timeline. However, the way it was phrased resulted in dozens of bots spamming him asking if he wanted to commission them. Thankfully, he took it in stride, and after the story people in the chat suggested actual Pokémon artists for him to follow.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • He used to read out ingredients on anything he could find in the drumming room as a practical joke if someone in the chat were to try and make him play while he was making conversation with the chat or resting. At one point, he finished reading one side of a product and moved onto the other side... only to realize that it was a French translation, since he picked up the item in question in Canada.
  • He once tried reading the instructions for his new microphone to fix peaking issues. Problem was... the instructions were in German. As he put it, his attempt at reading it sounded like he was speaking Spanish.
• Blatant Lies: Played for Laughs. When playing Pokémon Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee!'', he attempted to catch a Weezing, which just wouldn't stay in the ball. Each time he threw the Pokéball, he jokingly said "First try, Chat!" before uproariously celebrating when upon succeeding on the third attempt.
  Jerod (reading chat): "First time's the charm!"
• Blue Is Heroic: A lot of his shirts are blue, his favourite Pokémon is the blue Vaporeon, he has plushes of Mega Man, Vaporeon and a blue cat at his kit, his organic cat is called Blue, he loves Sonic the Hedgehog and Mega Man games and he has a giant photo of an exotic beach with a clear, blue sea on the wall behind him. You'd probably find less blue in a hypothetical collab between Blue Man Group, Eiffel 65 and The Smurfs than in his streams.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Becomes this a lot during his gaming streams, particularly in fan challenges such as his Kaizo Mario playthrough, his Super Mario 64 Crowd Control run (where it took seven victories against Bowser 3 to complete the game...) and could barely get past the first level of Halo during the charity Crowd Control race.
  • Averted during his Smash Bros. streams, where he very frequently wins against his viewers. In February 2021, only two people were able to win against him.
• Character Catchphrase: When a sub bomb gets dropped, Jerod will tell those gifted a sub to "Take the emotes, spread the love, and rock on."
• Companion Cube: Along with the plushies, he also has a jug and a water bottle with googly eyes that he drinks to stay hydrated during his streams, named "Chuggy".
• Couch Gag: A variation. Every one of his streams start with a different piece of music playing over some art of him rushing to his drum kit to get ready. Sometimes, he plays this straight and performs some kind of joke or gag, such as reading a dictionary upside down or having his wife at the kit when the camera comes on.
• Crossover:
  • He is good friends with Herman Li, who regularly raids Jerod and vice versa, and have even collaborated on content together.
  • His work with the TRG Colosseum also counts, with him either providing a concert for the charity marathon, or being one of the players on the games.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • In his earlier streams, he had a less advanced kit, the camera angle and the stream UI design was different, he had an enforced time limit, played in a church, and he had Kapchat set to light mode.
  • After moving to a different location, his camera appeared to film in a much more sepia tone.
  • He formerly had a whitelist, where viewers could place the name of a band/musician and Jerod would contact them to ask for permission to play their songs on cast. In late 2019, he dropped this and played whatever he wanted with little regard for copyright. After Twitch started cracking down on DMCA violations, he became more wary of tracks that could get him in trouble like before but despite this, the whitelist has not returned.
  • His current drum kit used to have a fourth tom on the far right, which was dropped due to a lack of usage.
• Every Episode Ending: The last song of the stream is almost always "Rainbow Road" by Nanobii.
• Exact Words: During a stretch break, a viewer challenged Jerod to do a back flip. When Jerod accepted, he declared "If there is a backflip that happens on this stream, you have to gift 50 subs." He did not mention who is doing the backflip. So, he volunteered his cat plushie Mint to do the deed.
• Exiled to the Couch: Jerod jokingly sings that Chatia will make him sleep on the couch after he plays a Skip card followed by a Reverse card against her in a round of the Uno video game.
• Eye Scream: Via chat emotes — Chatia pointed out that with the bubble tea straw a few of his emotes have it poking into one of their eyes.
• Failed a Spot Check:
  • Once streamed for three hours without noticing he wrote "Warining" in the title by mistake, resulting in a reaction comparable to BRIAN BLESSED and an equally good Skyward Scream when his chat told him.
  • He missed the second Z in a regular viewer's name for over a year and a half, resulting in a Running Gag where he'd heavily overemphasize it in later streams. Similarly, he got the y and g in another viewer's name switched around for several months, and continued to mix them up by accident even after realising.
  • He also didn't notice a switch on his hi-hat that stopped it from opening. He played with this hi-hat for over a year with it stuck shut.
  • Has announced that he will Avert this once as for all as of 2021, citing it "The Year of Character Development".
• First-Name Basis: His chat calls him Jerod just as often as 8-Bit.
• Fun Personified: His friends won't deny that he has naturally good energy that never turns off. It's hard to find a video where the guy isn't smiling or laughing.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Downplayed, but Jerod's Cursed Halo streams could easily be described to someone unfamiliar with what "Cursed Halo" means as "Jerod losing his mind over the course of 20 minutes." The chaos was taken Up to Eleven thanks to the editing in the highlight video.
• Gosh Darn It to Heck!:
  • He explicitly avoids cursing on his Twitch streams. This is parodied in a bumper where he explains "alternative swearing", in which any word can sound like a swear with the right inflection.
    Jerod: Oh EGGS!
  • When doing drum covers for Pizza Tower level intros, he instead refers to the level "Oh Shit" as "Oh Biscuits", with one of his Twitch emotes censoring "Shit" in the level title card.
• Hurricane of Puns: The chat. Chuggaaconroy would have to go full Rap God to throw out as many puns per stream as they do.
• Intermission: 8-Bit will usually have two stretch breaks during his streams that act as intermissions.
• Kindhearted Cat Lover: He has at least three emotes and an alert based on his cat, Blue, with Mint also being a plush cat. Not to mention how much he tweets about Blue.
• Large Ham: He has an infectious amount of energy whenever he performs, a necessity for any rock drummer.
• Lead Drummer: Why else do you think he's called "The 8-Bit Drummer"?
• LOL, 69:
  • Has an alert for 69 bits that consists of a gif of Saitama from One-Punch Man sensually wiggling his eyebrows. Mentions of 69 will also occasionally garner a "nice" from Jerod.
  • More recently, he added an alert for 6969 bits, which plays a Sonic-themed parody of the "Penis music" meme.
• Makes Just as Much Sense in Context: He once tried to upload a picture of his literal snare drum to... Onlyfans. Luckily, everything remained on during the process, and he eventually resorted to putting it on Twitter due to the former site's cumbersome uploading process.
• Meido: For direct relief, he dressed up as a bunny maid. Someone in the chat had the bright idea to ask him to put on furry gloves (which would mess with his grip). He did it anyway after daring the donations to cross the $7k mark.
• Mundane Made Awesome: Once extended his stream into a 37 minute overtime... so that he could order him and his wife Domino's Pizza. And it is WAY more awesome than it sounds.
• The Night Owl: He has stated that he wakes up later in the day, and mostly struggles with mornings.
• Non-Indicative Name: Ome time, he found dog food that was beef flavor. The ingredients? ...Chicken.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Has plenty of these, but a standout moment is when a viewer asked him to play the intro theme of British YouTuber, Ali-A. Not entirely seriously, he agreed with another person who said that he'd do so if one were to gift a hundred subs. After playing the Final Destination theme from Super Smash Bros. Brawl a viewer known for making massive donations bought up his challenge, resulting in said reaction followed by a beg not do do it... He did.
  • He covered a song by Yona, called "We Are Number One" but... The catch? The genre kept changing, sometimes to genres that aren't even used in conventional music.
    Text in video: Oh and Jerod, just in case you’re gonna cover this one too, I'm sorry lol.
    Jerod: Uh oh.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Jerod is about as close as you can get to a real-life Ned Flanders^note Christian, a Nice Guy and lives near Moe's, whose worst possible language is God-dang, frick or crap. The only times he's cursed on camera was by accident while on the phone, unaware that the person he was talking to was streaming, and after getting caught off-guard in Smash Bros, which he just laughed off. But should he get legitimately angry, you know something has really really got his goat. However, he doesn't let this go on for long.
• Opposite-Sex Clone:
  • Delwaifu, a gender-bent version of Jerod's moderator, Delcake. She was created as Fan Art, and sports orange gear to Delcake's blue.
  • The same person who made Delwaifu also made Jazzy, a gender-bent Jerod.
• Overly Long Gag: Sometimes, he receives so much support from the chat that he spends up to hours reading all of it off. A common component to this involves users constantly cheering 50 bits, the first one saying something like "(Verb) is THE BEST!" and then repeating the last two words in subsequent cheers.
• Power Outage Plot: A variant. On July of 2023, lightning ended up striking a power supply connected to Jerod's laptop, frying the sound card, a network card and a USB port, putting a stop the stream. The rest of the stream took place on Jerod's phone through 5G.
• Precision F-Strike: While he avoids cursing when he is live, his filter is understandably less strong when he collabs with other streamers that swear. Even so, he tries to avert this during their stream. One such instance of this slipping was during a game of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, when he lost a stock unexpectedly early.
• Proud to Be a Geek: 8-Bit has made no effort to hide his love of certain video games (i.e., Shovel Knight Video Game/{{Undertale}, and Them's Fightin' Herds'' ), not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.
• The Pollyanna: Good luck trying to find him legitimately angry. Jerod very rarely loses his cool on stream. Even when he does, he remains calm and civil with the offender, making absolutely certain not to explode.
• Pungeon Master: While his audience is filled with users that can make puns, Jerod himself has a habit of dishing out puns in his streams. His video editor HyperCole would occasionally slip in a Lame Pun Reaction post-production when making shorts.
• Rapid-Fire Typing: Downplayed in that we're not talking a full keyboard, but rather the four arrow keys. He's incredibly good at the game StepMania, and makes short work of some brutally fast songs throughout his playthrough.
• Real Men Love Jesus: Jerod's logo has a cross on it, and started out streaming in a church.
• Running Gag:
  • His habit of misspelling things and missing it for a long time has been an increasing one over the years. There have even been jokes that it has spread to his highlights editor HyperCole64.
  • He constantly picks tracks from the Bait-and-Switch music channel, SiIvaGunner. It's got to the point where he can tell whether a song is Silva based on the title format alone.
  • He occasionally reads a word related to a notable event out of a dictionary while speaking like GameChap, complete with fancy music to boot.
  • Upon receiving a large amount of Tier 3 subs at once, he dabs along to the track "Work Harder" from LISA.
• Scunthorpe Problem: When he introduced text-to-speech functionality, he noticed that the voice would read certain messages as "No", which was only supposed to happen if a message contained a banned word. The first time this happened was from someone trying to make the voice say "Let the bass kick up", and when he realized that the moderation system ignores spaces and it caught a banned word in "bass", he removed the word in question because no one was actually saying it. He was then quite perplexed when other messages were also read out as "No", and it took a few chat members to point out why: They were all from people cheering contained with the channel's emote, therefore the messages contained "The8BitCheer" instead of the default "cheer". He then had to spend some time during the next break adjusting his filter so it would only say "No" to messages containing the entire word.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Unfortunately, this moment was never uploaded to Youtube, only a clip but Jerod once played an old song teaching the listener how to pronounce the legendarily long name of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. Despite the name being said a total of 14 times in the song, Jerod admitted that he still couldn't pronounce it after the song ended.
• Stylistic Suck: He was once paid to play a song incorrectly, which he then does during the stream.
• Sudden Soundtrack Stop: It's not uncommon for Jerod to test a new alert, only for the test to get interrupted by someone cheering or resubbing, completely cutting the tested alert off in favour of the viewer's alert.
• Take a Third Option: No clip exists for this, but Jerod once asked his chat if they put the cereal first or the milk first when making breakfast. Most of the chat responded "Bowl first".
• Tempting Fate: Due to him playing a version of Megalovania with Wario's laughter accompanying it, the chat bought up an idea: Through the Fire and Flames set to Wario's laughter. Despite Jerod joking about how it's for the best that it doesn't exist, someone in the chat declared they were on it. Cue an Oh, Crap! reaction from those who were first discussing it.^note This will also become a Brick Joke if the Wario X Dragonforce video ends up being made.
• This Is Gonna Suck: A user once requested a speedcore t+pazolite song. One look at the picture, and Jerod went through a list of things about the picture that implied that the song was going to be hard.
  Jerod: Anime girl: Check. Red glowing eyes: Check. She's smiling: Check. There's fire: Check. Religious symbol: Check. She's in a school-girl outfit: Check. She makes me exceedingly uncomfortable: Check. She also has damage done to her face: Check. And she has a bow in her hair: Check.
  HomykSmash: But Jerod. Does she have a left wing?^note He is referring to a Running Gag from that particular stream where Twitch was distributing pride emotes to viewers. Homyk was able to receive a right pride-wing within the first few minutes, but not a left one.
  (the song begins with an ominous ringing noise)
  Jerod: The song starts with a freaking Church bell: CHECK!
  (the song randomly makes a "BOING!" noise)
  Jerod: The frick was that? (laughs wheezily)
  (after a long buildup, a woman in the song screams so loudly that she peaks the audio)
  Jerod: Oh, god! (starts playing) Whoever requested this is BANNED!
• Toilet Humour: Occasionally. There’s a chance of the 200 bit alert farting instead of popping, but there’s an even rarer chance of the alert being replaced by a fart sound drenched in reverb. There’s also an eleven minute video of chat breaking Jerod with toilet jokes, with Homyk calling Jerod just to flush a toilet before hanging up.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Cereal. He discusses his love for it often on Disc Only and even spent an entire stream making a tier list of cereals.
• Uncle Pennybags:
  • He is extremely generous where money is concerned. He once tipped $200 on a $60 pizza order to the driver, not to record a reaction but to 'Pay it forward'.
  • He has a story where he bought a large amount of Moe's Stacks from his local Moe's so that they could have an ice cream machine installed, ordering that said stacks be shared among those in the restaurant.
  • His charity streams also hit this with his viewers, many of whom donate upwards of $100 per cast, with some standout donations being the infamous $800.85^note Meant to resemble the word "boobs" donations, and he regularly matches the donations himself from his subs and tips.
• Uncommon Time:
  • 8-Bit has covered many songs that fall under this. An example is Scourge of the Furies, which has a section where the time signature switches between 5/4 and 6/4, making it 11/4 in total.
  • Not long ago, he played the Trainer battle music from Pokémon Legends: Arceus which is all over the place, containing 4/4, 6/8, 13/8 and even a polyrithmic shuffle on the latter.

---

Take the tropes, spread the tropes and rock on.

---