Electro Acoustic Percussion Pads
Circa. 2003 and Alon Ilsar was getting bored with playing electronic drum kits, frustrated with their inability to allow subtle expression ‘… 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 a viable alternative, or thrown it all in and taken up the sousaphone, Ilsar decided to do a little homespun instrument building. ‘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.’
Wanting to retain some sort of semi-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 little bits of junk. While this description may fail to convince some readers to stop looking for a local sousaphone teacher, the sounds that the EAPP could produce are musically ELECTRIC!
Coils, cassette cases, ash-trays, transducers, and mercury switches are just some of the components that make-up the EAPP. The peizo transducers are mounted onto each of the objects to act as contact microphones. Striking, scraping, flicking the objects with brushes, fingers, or any object that happens to be lying around produces a swathe of sounds to make you tickle and clap.
The EAPP (also cutely known as the Alonomophone) might be thought of as an all-of-body-junk percussion instrument – in which a performer’s body plays percussive objects while simultaneously triggering various sound processing effects, loops, and samples.
Sounds picked up by the transducers are sent via a mixer into a multi-effects unit. Effects on the incoming sounds are controlled by midi signals sent from a set of wearable triggers (comprising of mercury switches) attached to performer’s elbows, fingers, head, and feet. The EAPP also utilises feedback within the mixer and effects unit, live audio loops, and can also be setup to trigger pre-recorded audio, or visual samples if you’re really feeling tricky.
This all-of-body approach has since been taken to a whole new level through Ilsar’s most recent musical instruments such as his Head MARU.
moving on
Ilsar’s first foray into instrument building with the EAPP was a great success. His 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.’
While the EAPP might be sitting-out the next couple of gigs, the process of building this first instrument sparked Ilsar into developing more instruments. ‘… 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.’
Ilsar has now teamed up with instrument builder and technical whiz Mark Havryliv to develop a series of instruments that augment his electronic percussion. These new instruments continue to explore the possibilities for Ilsar to trigger and manipulate sounds by moving different parts of his body, while still playing other electronic percussion in live performance.
Alon is currently performing with the Head MARU, the first in this series of instruments, and is collaborating with Mark Havryliv to develop two more instruments – the Air Sticks and Air Pedal.
