SHONEEN STENFTENAGEL, ST. ANTHONY, IN

The Recording Connection truly believes our students have an opportunity to achieve something special while attending our program. Whether a member can take full advantage of this opportunity lies in his or her hands.

To help illustrate this, we asked Shoneen Steftenagel of Saint Anthony, IN to share some of her experiences after having completed 12 of her 20 lessons:

Actually, when I got started, it was really exciting,… there is an engineer, Greg and he is actually working on dance music, which is why my mentor really partnered meet up with him. Actually, Greg didn’t even know I was coming at first so he was actually a little shocked, but it turned out to be a great thing. Greg, is kind of self- taught, and he has this huge song that he’s working on and it’s really complex but so much of what’s in our heads we just ?get? between each other. He and I collaborated on this song for quite a while, and we had a guy named Damon from Owensboro (KY) come in, he and I would discuss what we were working on on the side like, “Do you think we need to EQ more on this, do you think we need to limit that.”

“We have a good connection, we can relate well and figure out what our tracks need and even work more with Greg to get his perspective and find out what else we can change on our sound. That was really good, being able to work with yet another engineer between the both of us, learning how to work with other people that are trying to do the same thing you are. Greg was really cool because the fact that I got to learn the business side of it. It’s like he’s the customer and I’m the one he’s coming to to make his work sound better, so I got the chance to see what it’s like to be in my job position and that was really cool to start off so quick.”

“He also had a guy come in and record a guitar lead, part one thing with me. I don’t know about everyone else, but I like to make sure that I get the ‘vibe’ from everybody. I really read people, so this musician was being very self conscience while we were recording. He wasn’t playing to his ability so I pointed out to him, “Hey, you’re kind of being self-conscious, like what’s going on?” And he was like, “No I’m not I’m the ‘Sword’” ha ha.”

“So basically, I talked to the other engineer and convinced them to tell him we were doing practice runs but to really record him because he was doing better when we told him we were just practicing. So, we said we would do three practice runs, just so he could get it right in his head, and I would give the engineer the que to go ahead and record it and the artist absolutely blew it up. Even the artist telling himself and everyone else in the room that he was good, that he was the ‘S’ helped his confidence, but also thinking that he wasn’t recording helped his confidence and lowered the pressure on his performance. I’m the type of person that likes to know everyone’s comfortable and in a place to show their best abilities however I have to do it.”

— Shoneen Steftenagel, Saint Anthony, IN