Wakinyan Shrubshall is guitarist and vocalist with Sutphin. The band's latest album is Medicine Machine.
"Drums was the first instrument for me. I started on that when I was 10 years old. Discovered the Beatles. Absolutely loved Ringo's playing. I started playing drums and picked up at about 14. Got an acoustic guitar. I got it to write songs. Also, because at the time, I didn't like any of the guitar players in any of the bands I was in. So I just took matters into my own hands.
I've discovered a lot of great guitar players in Wichita since then, but the music scene was very different when I was younger.
Drums is definitely a solid foundation for me to add a percussive element into my guitar playing. Writing drum parts is also part of what I do in Sutphin with Matt Targos, the drummer. He and I will collaborate on drum parts a lot he. He plays guitar as well, so he and I will both collaborate, when we write songs, where he'll come up with the guitar part, then I'll play drums to it, then we'll switch to play it live. It's become beneficial in terms of songwriting and collaborating with my fellow bandmates.
We write aggressive music but we're not against writing softer songs, which we have some softer songs and whatnot. We're never against writing anything at this point. It's kind of just whatever comes and comes naturally, we just go with it. Oftentimes it ends up being on the heavier side but we're not afraid of the other sides of things."
