Resound Studios - ARTISTS
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Sam Shabrin
2 albums available
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Sam Shabrin has been creating electronic and ambient music since 1975. He uses gear by Nord, Moog, Yamaha, Lexicon, Korg, Alesis and Sony. He is heavily influenced by Steve Roach, Brian Eno and Robert Rich, Vidna Obmana, Pete Namlook and Oenyaw.
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Somewhere in the late 1960s, amidst listening to the Beatles, Stones, Who, Dave Clark Five, Animals, Standells, Love, Pink Floyd, Jefferson Airplane, Cream, Herb Alpert, Donald Byrd, Peter Paul & Mary, Bill Cosby, Doors, Monkees, Simon & Garfunkel, and... and... and... I discovered an LP called Entropical Paradise by Douglas Leedy. It was a 3 (!) record set of electronic music. My only experience with electronic music up to this point was stuff I heard in school - mostly bleeps and bloops, and five out of six sides of this album was pretty much the same. But one side, entitled "The Harmonium", was different - a single chord for 20-some minutes with some slight variations close to the end. I had never heard anything like it before - a single chord for 20 minutes! A completely different direction in music.
I made it through high school (I was a classic textbook nerd wearing a sport jacket every day), singing in and conducting a choir, listening to Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Ravel, Mozart, mixed in with Captain Beyond, Steely Dan, Santana, Cat Stevens, Chicago, Yes, and... and... and... and a heavy dose of electronic music by Morton Subotnick and Beaver & Krause. High school led to college where my musical horizons continued to widen with monumental intensity - the music department had a Moog modular synthesizer. This was the same one pictured on the cover of "Switched On Bach". It took up half the room.
I immediately dropped out of the teaching program and switched to Theory and Composition so I could get my hands on the Moog. I created music on it for 3 years, presenting concerts of my music in the school's planetarium, and having a few pieces featured on WMMR in Philadelphia. Still, my music was pretty much bleeps and bloops, heavy on the sequencer with some melody and mood mixed in, but no sense of ambience (yet).
Skip ahead to somewhere around 1997-1998, when I discovered Acid. (Okay… first and last time I’ll make this stupid joke - the SOFTWARE, not the drug). Looping opened up yet another musical door for me. Before Acid (nope, sorry, won’t do it again), back in PA in the early ‘90s, I was listening to a lot of ambient music in particular, music by Steve Roach and Brian Eno. This type of music, as far back as “The Harmonium” in 1968, has always fascinated me. Now, through my Dell, I was creating my own.
Ambient music doesn’t rely on melody to create an atmosphere, a mood, a sonic environment, a soundscape. I think I’m so drawn to ambient music because I was never really adept at writing melodies throughout college. I concentrated on arranging and sound design. That’s what I did mostly in LA also, arranging, designing, polishing other peoples’ music, and that’s just what I was doing again. I spent a few years creating music on the computer, but was left with a feeling of being somewhat unfulfilled, I wasn’t really creating I was arranging other musician’s loops into songs. But the fire had been stoked.
In April of 2008, I had the outstanding, outrageous, unbelievable, incomprehensible good fortune to attend an “Into The Soundcurrent” ambient music workshop hosted by Steve Roach at his ranch and studio just south of Tucson, AZ. Steve is an internationally known master of the genre, making music since about 1983. His work “Dreamtime Return” is considered the Mona Lisa of ambient music. After getting over the initial stupendousness of meeting Steve, we spent a week soaking in music, making music, learning how to hear, see and feel music, eating and breathing music, appreciating music, swapping music… The fire in me was raging. I had to create! I put together a studio, some synths, a mixing board, echo and reverb processors and went to work.
Working on a long-form piece (listen to Steve’s “Immersion” series, or “Darkest Before Dawn” or “Deeper Silence”), the music took an unlikely left turn when I was struck with an idea. My wife had always had trouble sleeping she would be out 2 minutes after her head hit the pillow, but would wake up ay 2AM and not be able to go back to sleep. We had tried listening to sleep CDs, but the majority of them contained cheesy new age music, and lasted for only 1 hour. Even the CDs that contained brainwave pulses were meant to help you get to sleep but after that you were on your own. Some of the CDs even instructed you to set your player to repeat that could be pretty distracting at 4 in the morning. Worse yet, if the CD had brainwave pulses, the same patterns repeated all night long. That’s not how your brain works while you sleep.
It hit me… I did months of research, months of recording, re-recording, scrapping and starting over, mixing, mastering, and finally… I created “Somnience”, the first 8-HOUR LONG piece of ambient music with pulses that match your normal brainwave activity over the course of a healthy night’s sleep.
I sent out test copies of the CD to friends, relatives and patients of a naturopathic physician in Scottsdale AZ, and received back unanimously positive feedback. At that point I decided to roll it out, building a website, getting it professionally duplicated, getting it into some bookstore, music stores, spas, and doing everything I could think of to get the word out. So, here I am…
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