🇺🇸 Avery Molek

The six-year-old who played by ear

Avery Molek was born in 2006 and grew up in Washington, Pennsylvania, a small city southwest of Pittsburgh. His parents, Ed and Elizabeth Molek, told ABC News they had no musical background. When he was about two, they bought him a set of drums and a guitar at Toys R Us. He took to the drums.

The first sign that this was more than a toddler hitting things came just before his fourth birthday, when he played Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen” almost perfectly. His father asked how he had learned it. “Just by listening to it,” Avery said. Weekly 30-minute lessons followed. At six, his entire formal routine was that lesson plus 15 minutes of practice at home, three times a week — a remarkably light load for a drummer about to go viral.

A camera, a Catman mask and a KISS drummer’s email

His father started filming him for a practical reason: the camera made him finish songs. “Once he knew he was being recorded, he was more methodical in playing from beginning to end,” Ed Molek told ABC News. The family’s YouTube channel, now called Avery Drummer Molek, dates from 2009.

Avery’s first obsession was KISS, sparked by his father’s concert videos. In January 2012, at five, he posted a tribute in Peter Criss’s “Catman” makeup — 20 KISS songs in four minutes, plus Eric Carr’s 1981 drum solo, double bass drum included, according to the drum site Drummerszone. The videos went up partly at Avery’s request, so that KISS would see them. KISS did. Drummer Eric Singer posted them on the band’s Facebook page and website and, ABC News reported, became a mentor to the boy by email.

The attention turned into bookings. In May 2012 a company chief executive who had seen one of the videos invited him to play an hour-long set at a corporate event, and the country band Ruff Creek began bringing him to its shows. That year, at five, he played 15 shows in four states — among them the Hard Rock Cafe in Pittsburgh and the Illinois State Fair — billed as the Out of the Basement Tour. A year later he joked online that at six, anything more than one gig counted as a tour.

“Hot for Teacher” and the week that changed everything

In late March 2013 the family posted Avery’s cover of Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher.” It is a punishing choice for any drummer: the 1984 track opens with about 30 seconds of drums that roll into a double-kick shuffle, the part Alex Van Halen made famous. The six-year-old’s version passed 681,000 views in about a week, and in the first days of April ABC News, the International Business Times and the metal site Noisecreep all ran the story.

Then came an accident of scheduling. Good Morning America aired a segment on Avery while Brad Paisley happened to be in the studio, and the country star invited him back to play. On April 12, 2013, a six-year-old and one of Nashville’s most accomplished guitarists played “Hot for Teacher” live on national television. The same morning Avery was a guest on LIVE with Kelly and Michael.

Paisley was not finished. On June 1, 2013, he brought Avery onto his own stage at the First Niagara Pavilion in Burgettstown, a short drive from the Moleks’ home, for the same song. The local news site Patch described him as “barely seen behind the massive drum kit” — and said he “stole the show.” By July the original cover was approaching two million views. By 2020 it had passed four million.

Why professionals paid attention

Viral child performers are common. Viral child performers whom professionals praise without condescension are not. The Observer-Reporter, Washington’s daily newspaper, explained the difficulty in plain terms: keeping time on the bass drum while working the snare and hi-hat is “like hopping on your right leg and patting your head with your left hand.” Devon Allen Johnson, who led Ruff Creek, was blunter: “I have honestly played with drummers 20 years older who didn’t play the songs as well.”

In 2015, at eight, Avery took on Dream Theater, the progressive-metal band built on odd meters and sudden shifts. His cover of “Panic Attack” drew a public reply from the band’s co-founder Mike Portnoy, then its former drummer (he rejoined Dream Theater in 2023): “What???????? Are you kidding me??” A few months later Avery posted “The Dance of Eternity,” an instrumental famous for its constant changes of time signature, and Portnoy shared it within two hours with a verdict in capitals: “ABSOLUTELY INSANE!!! MIND BLOWN….” Asked whether he could have played like that at eight, Portnoy answered: “OF COURSE NOT!”

Avery was candid about the effort. “This one was REALLY hard for me,” he wrote of “Panic Attack.” “I had to focus on the bass changes through the whole song!”

On stage with KISS and Steel Panther

In 2014 the KISS story came full circle: Avery played “Love Gun” with members of the band at a pre-show acoustic set, the rock magazine Louder reported. Three years later, at ten, he went to see Steel Panther at Stage AE in Pittsburgh carrying a hand-made sign. Security took it at the door.

“My sign ‘Can I Play, Hot For Teacher?’ got taken at the door so we made a new sign inside,” he wrote afterward. “I am so happy it worked.” The band called him up, and a ten-year-old played the song that had made him famous with a group that built its career on parodying 1980s metal.

A family that kept saying no

The Moleks turned down much of the attention that came their way. “A lot of offers have come in,” Ed Molek told the Observer-Reporter in 2013; the point, he said, was not getting his son onto every talk show. The family’s test, he had told ABC News that April, was simple: “If he doesn’t have fun and doesn’t enjoy it, we won’t do it. That’s our gauge.”

They also said, early and on the record, that they did not want a child star. “We decided we didn’t want our kid to go into the entertainment industry,” his father said. Avery, then six, offered his own summary to the same newspaper. “I’m still a child,” he said. “I love video games.”

Where is Avery Molek now?

In May 2020, at 13, Avery re-recorded “Hot for Teacher” seven years after the original and posted the two versions side by side. “Now recording this song again 7 years later, shows me how far I have come and how hard work pays off,” he wrote. That November he posted a tribute to Eddie Van Halen, who had died weeks earlier. It is the last item about him in the music press.

Since then the public record is thin, and this page does not fill the gap with guesses. His channel remains large and active in reach: as of September 22, 2026 it had about 510,000 subscribers, 333 videos and more than 209 million views, with roughly 14,000 new views a day. The undated biography on his official site introduces him as 18. No reliable source has reported his college, a current band or a touring schedule. Born in 2006, he is 19 or 20 as of September 2026.