Who first noticed you poking around a mixing console?
For Shane, his curiosity struck him early, and it forever changed his awareness of recordings and music.
“How did you, kind of, fall into music or fall in the technology side?”
It was probably falling into the technology. I mean it was definitely falling into the recording technology side. I went to a tiny little church in the neighboring county, too tiny to actually have any kind of audio program, but they did. There was a computer science major out of Muncie, Indiana who put together the audio program there, and he just noticed, I think I was 11 or 12, but he noticed I was always kind of poking around and asking questions and looking in the door, and eventually he was like, “you want to learn how to do this?” and I said “yes,” and so I did.
And as usually goes with backwoods churches, there was a church split later and we left there, but it kind of stuck with me as I got into music as a teen. As a consumer it occurred to me one day that somebody who wasn't... I realized that i didn't necessarily have natural musical ability as a player or a performer, but I was drawn to music... it occurred to me that somebody must do that somebody must make those records. And I started looking at credits, and like and at some point in my high school career discovered that Indiana University had an audio program, and my dad's factory offered a scholarship to kids, and I won one of those and went to IU to study audio engineering. The program was small enough that you didn't just declare an audio engineer major. You had to take the first semester of classes and then apply to the program.
Back then they didn't allow more than 12 students in a year, so you know, you kind of were just shooting in the dark for that first semester taking all the classes and waiting for that letter over Christmas break. Because it's pre-internet so it wasn't email or anything like that, and waiting to see if I actually had a major to go back to, and I did. And it was an associate's degree, so it was five semesters on campus and then one semester of an internship to get the degree.