Building the Beat of Your Own (electronic) Drum
Recently I started collecting examples from people who have tweaked, adapted, extended, perverted, or destroyed existing musical instruments.
We may not always notice it, but musical instruments are constantly changing. Just as musical styles evolve - blending, stretching - so too do musical instruments. As Tom Waits tells us ‘… the problem is that most instruments are square and music is always round.’ Round music requires rounder instruments - instrument development and musical styles are tightly wound together, each shaping the other.
People tweak and extend instruments, develop gadgets and devices, plugins and software, in order to achieve a different type of sound or way of playing. Sometimes there’s the necessity, or inspiration, or accident, that takes things further, into a new musical instrument.
Alon Ilsar is one such musical adventurer, having developed a number of new electronic percussion instruments: the EAPP, the head MARU, and the Airsticks and Air Pedal – two prototype instruments.
A drummer by trade, Ilsar plays a wide variety of gigs: as a member of the Keating the Musical band; Circus Monoxide; experimental pop group Gauche; anarchic interactive cover band Glitch Jukebox; Darth Vegas; and Trigger Happy, an electronica duo with Greg Seiler (aka Comatone). It’s this last incarnation that provides the space for Ilsar’s own instruments to romp and roam.
THE EAPP
Let’s rewind back about four years. Ilsar was getting bored with playing electronic drum kits, frustrated by their inability to allow subtle expression. As Ilsar explains ‘… you basically hit a pad and get a sound, there’s no realness to it, no definition, no skill really.’
Where others may have reached for a laptop and software as an alternative, or thrown it all in and taken up the sousaphone, Ilsar decided to do a little homespun instrument building. Wanting to retain an acoustic and tactile feel, what emerged from his tinkering was the EAPP (electro acoustic percussion pads) - essentially two snare drums worth of contact mics attached to a bunch of little bits of junk. While this simple description may fail to convince some readers to stop looking for a local sousaphone teacher, the sounds that the EAPP could produce were musically ELECTRIC! Ilsar’s do-it-yourself instrument building approach provided him with a low-cost, musically exciting alternative. As he describes ‘… the sounds were really dynamic… though it was a clunky instrument and had its own limitations. I played a few Gauche and some improv gigs with it and then laid it to rest, for a while at least.’
Ilsar’s first foray into instrument building was a great success. Not only that a musically interesting instrument was produced, but for what the process of constructing an instrument had sparked inside Ilsar ‘… I suppose being a percussionist you’re always finding new percussive sounds, so it all seems very natural for me to build new instruments. There’s no real reason why instruments should be so standardised.’
THE Head MARU
Following the EAPP, Ilsar teamed up with instrument builder and technical whiz Mark Havryliv to develop a series of instruments that would allow him to trigger and manipulate sounds by moving different parts of his body, while still playing other electronic percussion and drums in live performance. Ilsar explains ‘… there’s no limitation once you get into electronic percussion of what sounds you can sample and recreate. Inspiration comes more from limitation I suppose. Sometimes you hear things that you want to try to create live but have no way of doing so.’
Building new musical instruments is often a collaborative process between a number of people, each of whom bring their own unique set of skills to the project. Ilsar brought the overall concept and the instrumental skills to shape and refine the instrument, with Havryliv providing the technical expertise to realise the vision. Havryliv has not only built some of his own instruments, but has used his technical skills to assist a number of other musician-instrument builders develop their own instruments.
The first instrument to be developed, the head MARU (Midi Algorithmic Response Unit), is essentially a cap with an accelerometer built into it. Calibrated using the Eclipse program, the X,Y messages sent from the accelerometer are converted into MIDI messages and sent to the Ableton Live program, in which Ilsar’s audio samples and plugins are kept. A simple java interface enables Ilsar to tweak the various parameters on the fly. Ilsar describes ‘… for example I can change the pitch of a sample by moving my head forward and back, and change the amount of reverb by moving left to right. This started getting really exciting, even if I looked a little weird moving my head around randomly while playing.’ Yet in designing the head MARU, Ilsar felt it important to demonstrate a recognisable connection between movement and sound, ‘… an obvious correlation to how I’m moving, which seems rare in the world of instrument design where patches become so complex that they seem randomly produced.’
A direct connection between playing an instrument and making sound seems an obvious one for most musical instruments people are familiar with, to the point where we can often predict what sound will occur when an instrument is played a certain way. But when building new instruments, making the connection between action and sound is optional - in fact some instrument builders deliberately blur any connection.
AIRSTICKS + AIR PEDAL
Having performed with the head MARU across numerous Trigger Happy gigs over the past 12-months, including Lan Franchis, Peats Ridge, and the Great Escape Festival, Ilsar and Havryliv are now working on prototypes for two more instruments: the Airsticks and Air Pedal.
The Airsticks will allow the player to punch in and out of a 3-dimensional field, so when the drumsticks enter, move around, and leave a rectangular field sounds can be triggered and manipulated. Ilsar explains ‘… a sudden change of direction within a box could trigger a sample, which could stay on until the stick leaves the box. If the stick leaves the box to the left of the field the pitch could drop too, or if the stick is rotated then that might trigger a short delay.’ Though still a prototype, the Air Pedals will offer a similar functionality to the head MARU, enabling Ilsar to use sensors on his feet to trigger or manipulate sound.
Unfortunately most instruments don’t survive beyond a prototype. An instrument’s future rests on the builder asking themselves all sorts of questions: Am I happy with the instrument? Does it work? Do I like its sound? Is it playable? Do I want others to play it? Can I afford to keep it going? Am I looking for commercial potential? And more.
But instrument building is a careful measure of both journey and end. As Ilsar comments ‘… essentially I’m sick of setting up a drum kit. I want to be able to rock up to a gig, plug a couple of wires in, and start making a shitload of noise.’ I think the success of an instrument lies not in how many people end up playing it, but whether it fulfils the requirements of the people involved in its creation. Just as important is the influence that many obscure or forgotten instruments have had on subsequent instrument development. When it comes down to it, people are inventing instruments to produce the sounds they want, to make the music we’ve yet to hear.
