Long before he started getting into hardware synths, as a kid in northwest Detroit, Shake was a drummer, although he told Resident Advisor in 2010 that he never had a hi-hat for his kit, and didn’t learn the instrument “correctly”. He was later taught how to DJ by friends Howard Fanning, Arnold Nevels, and Neicy and Altorio Upshaw, and won a mix competition on the Mixer Dome segment of The Electrifying Mojo’s radio show while he was still in high school.
The foundation of Shake’s own music was in sampling; using the E-mu SP12 digital drum machine and sampler, he drew from hip-hop techniques to develop his unique sound. “I seen Shake do some shit on the SP12,” Eddie Fowlkes says. “You only have so many seconds [of sampling time] to do it, but Shake had a rhythm with it. I was like, ‘man, you’re pretty good’.”
“Chuck D famously called hip-hop a ‘sampling sport’, and I was just trying to apply that to techno,” Shake told DMY magazine in 2012. “Derrick, Juan and Kevin all had their unique sound, so I knew I had to find my own unique sound, because I just had to be a part of it.”
Unsurprisingly then, alongside his skills as a producer for the dancefloor, Shake proved adept at making hip-hop. ‘Mr. Shakir’s Beat Store’ — one of the artist’s only albums, released in 2000 via German label Klang Elektronik — is a downtempo classic fuelled by crisp, low-slung beats and choice, deeply-dug samples. The track ‘On That Tip’, with its heavy drum programming and eerie keys, was a key selection on Craig Richards’ ‘Fabric 15’ mix. “If he’d pursued a more hip-hop style he probably would have been bigger, but he loved dance music,” Eddie Fowlkes says.