Sivamani, or commonly known as Drums Sivamani is an Indian percussionist. He began drumming at the age of 7 and started his musical career at the age of 11, and later shifted to Mumbai. He plays many instruments including drums, octoban, darbuka, udukai, ghatam and kanjira. He performed drumming during the IPL Championships in 2008 and 2010. He is affiliated with the Chennai Super Kings team, but gained recognition through his work with A. R. Rahman, who he has been close friends with, since childhood. He was inspired by Noel Grant and Billy Cobham. He has played for M.S.Viswanathan, K.V. Mahadevan, G. Devarajan, Illayaraja, A. R. Rahman and others. In 1990, he shared the stage with Billy Cobham at Mumbai's Rang Bhavan. He has stated that S. P. Balasubrahmanyam is his godfather. In 2019, he was conferred with the Padma Shri.
We had the honour to host him along with Rhythm Shaw and Swanand Kirkire to help plan ideas for some of their upcoming songs. This session was very unique and an absolute joy ride. Sivamani being a total revolutionary, brought in various elements into the session and used unique looking objects to create beats from. The placement of the guitarist and the entire micing technique was extremely unique and very new to even us. It felt like a breath of fresh air, experimenting with these unique techniques with these genius amazing musicians.
By the end of the session, we could safely say that we had explored every single inch and dynamics of our Studio C which is a SSL Origin room that supports 32 channels of simultaneous inline recording, with a whole host of outboard gears like Shadow Hill pre amps, Focus Right pre amps, Neve compressors, Elysia compressors, TC electronics FX and many more.