But How did we get here?

I’ll never forget the first time I sat down at a Rhodes piano. Not too long after that I swept my first resonant low-pass filter and was hooked. Huh, so that’s how they get those sounds. As a “classically trained” professional musician, I fell hard for the fresh, aesthetically-driven approach to sound and music offered by working with samplers and electronic instruments, and began creating and experimenting with them on a daily basis. As a heavily technical person, however, I also immediately began to disassemble these instruments and work to understand, repair, and improve them. Past university coursework in electronics theory and circuit design took on new relevance and I started building my own studio space, buying very nice but very broken equipment and bringing it back to life. The years passed, my knowledge deepened, and little by little I began working on electric pianos, recording gear, and electronic instruments for customers and friends after-hours in my woodwind shop space. Word leaked out that I was doing this work, and demand increased to a point where these side jobs were taking up a large portion of my time and interest. Finally I realized that this was the direction things were heading and made the jump to open up Shook Sound.

You may notice that there’s a little more going on here than a typical repair shop. In an effort to create a proper haven of analog gear, musical hardware, and good sounds, the space here is divided into two opposing but complimentary halves. One side of the room is set up as a repair shop with benches, test equipment, and a wall of parts, and the other half is set up as a creative zone with lots of juicy analog gear, synths, and samplers all hooked up and ready to create new sounds. Stay tuned for some ideas we have around connecting these left-brain and right-brain halves of the space for education, entertainment, and sonic glory.