Metro Detroit Native Wins American Beatboxing Championship

ROCHESTER HILLS, MI — You may realize it, but beatboxing is celebrated as an art form and the American champion comes right here from Metro Detroit.

Meet Devon Guinn. He says his beatboxing style is “silly” and lyric-based. Just last month he took his skills to the stage to win the 2019 American Beatbox Loopstation Championships, andwill be representing American (and Michigan) next year at the World Beatbox Championships.

“I grew up in Rochester Hills, and I found my love of beatboxing while performing with our student-run cappella group at Stoney Creek High School,” Guinn said.

He then went on to graduate from Harvard, where he continued to follow his passion for beatboxing on a national level.

“When I started beatboxing in high school, I would practice along with Youtube Videos of my favorite beatboxers (many of whom were at the championships!),” Guinn said.

He received a grant from Harvard to go shadow "The Beatbox House," a collective of some of the worlds greatest beatboxers. There, he lived with them for a month and a half in Brooklyn, and they really kickstarted his serious beatboxing. He started going to more competitions and taking beatboxing more seriously, and even wrote some papers with one of his professors about beatbox notation.

He says it takes a lot of practice to learn the art form and then find your own style.

“For looping, I sat in my room for hours, my headphones plugged into my loop machine, trying to practice enough that I knew I could nail my routines live,” he said about mastering the skill. "The problem with looping is that if you make a mistake, you're often stuck with it for the rest of the song — or you have to just start over in front of everyone, which is never a good look. I've made lots of mistakes in disastrous loopstation performances in my past, so I practiced over and over until I could get it right every time on the first try.”

In addition to prepping for world championships, Guinn likes to give back by teaching his skill to students — the same kind of aspiring beatboxers he once was in high school. He teaches through workshops, podcasts, appearances and assemblies.

“I used to give private lessons, and mainly now do workshops or assemblies at schools and use beatboxing as a way to get kids exciting about the arts and self directed learning,” he said. “I've done several workshops through Project Teach, a program based on research from the Harvard Ed school, which tries to help 7th graders develop a ‘college going identity.’

He also does workshops and assemblies at K-12 schools where he talks about his own educational path, and how he approaches learning things when there aren't readily-available resources.

“In beatboxing, there's no repertoire or notation system, so it involves a lot of self-directed learning,” he said.

For now, it’s keeping focused on his ultimate goal.

“I'm hoping to use my new title as a platform to help push beatboxing forward,” he said. “My style is much more comedy-focused and organic than a lot of other loopers, who do heavy EDM, Dubstep, and Hardstyle music. It feels amazing to be validated after years of practicing, especially since I didn't try to mold my sound to fit what everyone else was doing. Now, I just need to keep practicing to prepare for the World Championships in 2020.”

Some of his past workshops and things are available on his website: devonguinn.com.