Shocksteady | en

Shocksteady: Two Dutch producers/DJ’s who are best friends since their early years.

Thijs Ploegmakers (25) and Dirk Jans (26) were born in Schaijk, a small town in the south of The Netherlands.
In the early nineties they discovered the power of House music.

They like almost every House-style: trancy, techy, groovy, funky music or harder stuff, whatever…. As long as it is creative and has a good flow.

In January 2006 Shocksteady’s first record: ‘Take a Ride’ is officially released on Liquid, a well-known label from Dutch dance-major Spinnin’ Records.
Within a week the white-label was supported by DJ’s like: Cosmic Gate, Cor Fijneman, Blank & Jones, Lange, Mark Norman, Jochen Miller, Bart Claessen (aka Barthezz), Yves De Ruyter, Scott Mac, The Freak, GTR, John O' Callaghan, Talla 2XLC, Mike Koglin, Joop, DJ Choose, Ernesto & Bastian and many more...

The vinyl contains 3 mixes:
Shocksteady’s Brazilian Wax Mix, Club Mix and a remix by Santoro Project.
The Radio edit (on the CD-single) gets full support on several radio stations.

In 2002 and 2003 Thijs and Dirk produced together with friend and producer Ron van Kroonenburg the tracks ‘Freeloader’ and ‘Anything Goes’ under the project name Driftwood. ‘Freeloader’ became a worldwide club-hit and it even reached mainstream chart-success in the UK, Germany, Belgium and The Netherlands.
As the Driftwood DJ-Team they played in several European countries and of course a lot in their home base: The Netherlands.

The life of Thijs revolves around music. Since his youth he is taking pianolessons. He's still doing this right until this very day.
When he was 14 years old he discovered Hardcore music. In a small local youth club he heard the track ‘Thunderball – Bonzai Channel One’ and he was sold. He wanted to know all about this music and started his record collection and began experimenting with music software like Scream Tracker and Impulse Tracker. The strength of Thijs lies in the melodies, but more and more he got interested in the technical side of producing.

The first time Dirk heard the sounds of Public Energy's classic "303-Energy" in the early nineties. After this experience he became a real house music fanatic.
Dirk started experimenting and practicing on a Commodore-64 computer.
When the Dutch Hardcore scene arose, his love for electronic dance music grew bigger and bigger. Nowadays he likes almost every style of dance music, from Trance to Techno and Disco to Hardcore.

They both finished their education last year. Thijs graduated in Higher Economics and Dirk as a higher Engineer in Mechanics, he also graduated in Higher Business Administration.

During their studies they invested in studio equipment. In spite of their education they choose to spend their days full-time in their two studios.
In the near future they want to produce all styles of House music. .