Oliver Mills was born in Stuttgart, Germany. Already in early childhood he showed interest in drums. His first instruments consisted of various cooking pots, buckets and cooking spoons, which he then used to improvise tirelessly to Queen and Dire Straits.
As a teenager, he was accepted into the preparatory conservatory class at the Heidelberg Music School. There he learned the entire percussion instrumentarium from his first formative teacher, Georg Hromadka.
At the age of 17, Oliver Mills passed the entrance examination to the Folkwang Musikhochschule in Essen. A year later he transferred to the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, where Prof. Klaus Kiessner and Prof. Oswald Vogler were his teachers.
During this time he played in various youth and student orchestras. Among others, he was a member of the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival Orchestra for several years, where he also played with Sergiu Celibidache and Leonard Bernstein. Even before the end of his studies, the Bielefeld Philharmonic Orchestra engaged him as 1st percussionist. Later he became principal timpanist there.
Since 2003 Oliver Mills has been engaged as deputy principal timpanist with the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra.
Oliver Mills is also regularly engaged as timpanist and percussionist with other major orchestras, such as the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, the NDR Symphony Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Stuttgart RSO, the Dresden Staatskapelle and the Bavarian State Orchestra.