BEHIND THE MUSIC OF AMIR SAMTANI

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Amir Samtani was born on December 14, 1996, in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and spent the early stages of his life in Guinea, West-Africa.

Around the age of 5, he was lured in by a keyboard lying around his house in Guinea and instinctively played notes from his favorite video games. It was at that time that Amir felt a solid connection to the realm of music. Though the keyboard disappeared a few days later, his mind continued to resonate with notes and sounds around him.

 

It wasn’t until Amir and his family moved back to The Netherlands that he finally got his hands on a guitar, at a friend’s birthday party, where he spent most of the time playing on that instrument. To his surprise, everyone else said he played the instrument so naturally. His parents then decided to enrol him in guitar classes, where he studied the instrument for a few years until he decided to drop out because he felt that he could use all the preparation time to practice the instrument more efficiently. Starting on a small Spanish guitar, his soul was also drawn to the world of electric guitars. He continued on this journey and moved to London in 2014 to study Music at Middlesex University, where he graduated with a degree in Popular Music.

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Amir comes from different cultural backgrounds as the second child to an Indian father and a Lebanese mother and having lived in other parts of the world such as West-Africa, The Netherlands, The United Kingdom, and Japan. This vast environment and frequent business trips exposed Amir to diverse music styles and genres such as Rock, Metal, Classical, Jazz, Flamenco, Traditional African, Japanese, Arabic, Bollywood, and many others. He claims his favorite artist to be Michael Jackson and notes Van Halen, Def Leppard, Wands, Steel Panther and Guns’N’Roses as some of his favorite bands. His guitar playing is strongly influenced by Eddie Van Halen, Steve Vai, Steve Lukather, Yngwie Malmsteen, Brian May, Paco de Lucia, George Benson, and a few other notable guitarists. On the Classical side, he finds himself influenced mainly by Nobuo Uematsu, Joe Hisaishi, Tchaikovsky and Bach.

 

Amir Samtani is currently working on a few recording projects, solo and collaborative for his next release. His latest single was written during the different stages of Covid-19, to honor those who have and are still suffering from the pandemic.