Meet Your Newest Obsession: DSM Beatboxer 80Fitz

You may recognize him as the crazy good beatboxer from Das Sound Machine in Pitch Perfect 2 , but make no mistake; 80Fitz has been killing it for a while now. When he's not making feature lengths films, 80Fitz (whose real name is actually Andrew Fitzpatrick) is making six-second videos on the app Vine — and with a pretty big following, I might add. It may seem like all this success happened overnight, but Fitzpatrick's beatboxing career started long before his videos on social media. Almost 10 years ago, Fitzpatrick said it all started when he heard a beatboxer named Rahzel — a musician he says revolutionized beatboxing: "He was the first guy to sing and beatbox at the same time and when my little 15 and 16 year old friends and I heard it, we kinda got obsessed."

Pretty soon, he was getting kicked out of his high school's choir class for beatboxing too much instead of singing. Eventually, his friends quit beatboxing, but he never really stopped. Flash forward to his college years, at which point Fitzpatrick said he joined an a cappella group called the UW MadHatters. Yes, that's right he actually has an a cappella background like his character in Pitch Perfect 2.

For the next four years he became their resident beatboxer — and, by the looks of this video, people took notice of his talent.

After graduation, Fitzpatrick was feeling pretty good about his skill, so he took his career to the next level and started battling. He battled in the American Beatbox Championships in 2011, and eventually made Top 16 in 2012. But, even with this success, Fitzpatrick wasn't done yet.

Like many other artists before him, he started using social media to his advantage. After posting his work on Vine, people began to take notice — including Grammy-winning producer Ben Bram (the same guy behind a cappella group Pentatonix). Bram reached out to him about The Sing-Off and, though Fitzpatrick wasn't interested at the time, the two stayed in touch. Eventually, Bram did reach out to him again, this time about a really cool opportunity with a little movie called Pitch Perfect 2. And, well, the rest is history.

Now that he's got a feature film under his belt, where exactly does he plan to go from here? For now, he's going to keep making Vines, but he's also got some other things cooking. "I’ve got plans to release a second EP/album with my producer, buddy Jay, and I’m working on some music that I plan to release as 80Fitz, but it shouldn’t be out probably until fall," Fitzpatrick said. Well, I certainly can't wait to see what the rest of his career holds. Be sure to check him out, because this guy is obviously going places, and Pitch Perfect 2 is just the start of that.

Image: Getty Images