Snared, Wired, Crashed was created in collaboration with percussionist Josh Perry. The initial idea was to develop a hybrid acoustic-electronic instrument that would allow Josh to play on one snare drum and to trigger a reaction echo on another snare, positioned at some distance across the performance space. During a residency in 2019 at Mise-En_Place in New York City we arrived at a different scheme, placing contact mics and transducer drivers on a snare and crash cymbal and creating various feedback loops between the instruments. Using a Max patch the signal from each contact mic could be sent out to either acoustic instrument, creating snare-to-snare, cymbal-to- cymbal, or snare-to-cymbal-to-snare-to-cymbal (etc.) feedback. Additional digital delays and feedback were built into the patch to afford diverse feedback gestures generated in response to Josh’s performance actions. During the residency concert, we improvised together; I live- engineered the patch while Josh played on both snare and cymbal using a broad array of percussion techniques.

Following the residency we determined that our goal would be a self-contained piece that Josh could perform without a sound engineer—or put another other words, that he would be the sound engineer as well as performer of the acoustic-electronic-digital instrument. Simply adding two MIDI expression pedals, allowed him to control the outputs to the transducer drivers and therefore manage the overall level of feedback. After further sessions and tweaking, I arrived at what seems to be nearly the final instrument design. We added a bass drum and thunder sheet, each driven by copies of the outputs to snare and cymbal. These serve effectively as the “woofers” to the snare and cymbal “tweeters,” and allowing us to send less power to each speaker object. In addition to the superior overall frequency range this has helped us avoid occasional smoke coming from one of the transducer drivers during the loud parts!