Who is Minco De Bruin? Beats the hell out of us, but he just won a $10,000 scholarship from Mapex, Paiste, and Drummer magazine to attend the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance. Lucky bastard. Here’s the press release:

The Institute of Contemporary Music Performance was recently the proud host to the 2008 drum scholarship finals, with the standard of performances the best that ICMP has ever seen!

The eight drum finalists were competing for one full and one partial scholarship (worth £4,950 and £2,500 respectively) onto the Institute’s world renowned Higher Diploma. The Higher Diploma is a specialist one-year full-time course, developed by the Institute to train and develop students of guitar, bass, drums and vocals for a career in the music industry. It was the first full-time course of its kind ever developed in the UK and achieving a place on the course continues to be an aspirational goal for young musicians. Institute alumni can be found throughout today’s music industry, working with artists of the calibre of Babyshambles, Lemar, Radiohead, Eric Clapton, Keane and KT Tunstall.
Each finalist underwent a short interview before taking to the stage to give a performance in front of a panel of specially invited judges, including Mapex’s Pete Harvard and senior ICMP tutors. The standard of all of the finalists was extremely high, so after some very difficult deliberations the panel awarded the full drum scholarship, sponsored by Mapex/Paiste and Drummer Magazine, to Minco De Bruin, and the partial scholarship to Justin Shaw.

Every year the Institute and our industry partners provide Scholarships worth in excess of £30,000, representing a fantastic opportunity for deserving students to access world class training and tuition at one of the world’s leading schools of contemporary music. Watch out for news of the 2009 Scholarships and for your chance to join us!