by Aquiles Priester

Usually books become movies. The history of the seventh art is so filled with examples that it's not worth citing one specific movie. That is the natural order of things. But what when this natural order is inverted and the movie becomes a book? That is what happened with drummer Aquiles Priester. After releasing two videos where he shows his unbeatable technique, in 2013 he released "Aquiles Priester's Top 100 Drum Fills", a selection of fills that he recorded with the various bands he played in - Hangar, Angra, Freakeys. So, during the recording other fills were created and, as they were interesting ideas, they ended up being included in the package. This resulted in 150 fills, 100 of which were selected for the video - 25 ended up being included as bonus tracks, including themes with Hangar, Tony MacAlpine and Midas Fate. Like everything else he does, success was immediate. The video was voted "Best Educational DVD of The Year" by the renowned North-American magazine Modern Drummer, another feat for a musician used to accumulating similar feats. Now "Aquiles Priester's Top 100 Drum Fills" has just become a book. "Many people asked me for the scores of the fills shown in the video," says Aquiles, "and as I had almost everything written down, I decided to make their lives easier." It is another release by a musician used to breaking barriers as in 2011, when he became the only drummer in Brazilian history to enter the ranking of Modern Drummer magazine as 5th best prog metal drummer of the world, next to names like Neil Peart, Mike Portnoy, Gavin Harrison and Marco Minnemann. In 2015 Aquiles was once more nominated to take part of another poll and was elected best drummer in the "hard rock" category by the North-American magazine Drum!. More than that, he was also the first Brazilian drummer to have signature instruments released by manufactures such as Paiste, Pro-Mark and Mapex, besides having built a solid international career accompanying renowned musicians such as Tony MacAlpine and Vinnie Moore and being part of one of the biggest revelations of Brazilian metal in the last ten years, the band Noturnall.