Product Engineers
Tim Shaw is the Chief Engineer-Guitars for Fender Musical Instruments, helping the company create guitars, pickups and other products. Tim’s career began when Charlie Wicks hired him to repair guitars for his retail store. He found his way to R&D at Gibson in Kalamazoo in 1978 and worked with...
John Fields grew up in Meridian and took a great interest in his mother’s job at Peavey Electronics. As a kid, John worked on electrical components and built his first guitar at the age of 12. He later studied electronics and got a degree in Electrical Engineering before working with the engineer...
Willie Hatcher gives a great deal of credit to the public-school system in Mississippi when he was growing up in the 1950s for providing a variety of shop classes. Those instructional courses included woodworking, automotive, and machine shop, and they all provided Willie with the background he...
Chuck Neitzel joined Deering Banjo in January 1979 having previously been a woodworker with antique furniture. Chuck also brought with him a deep respect and passion for bluegrass music, which he had followed and played since he was a young man. Working closely with Greg Deering in the early days...
Paul Peace holds several patents on the cinema side of professional audio having worked with IMAX on and off for nearly 20 years. One of his many exciting projects was creating the sound for the Back to the Future ride at Universal Studios in Hollywood. He continued to focus on cinema audio when he...
Bruce Howze is the founder of Community Professional Loudspeakers, which he established in 1968 after being asked to provide sound for such venues as the Electric Factory in Philadelphia. Bruce designed the first midrange sound system and later toured with rock and roll bands to test out his...
Steve Johnson played saxophone in high school and in college while earning his electrical engineering degree. He was able to apply both passions when he joined the pro audio industry working for companies such as Shure and Harman, and also while serving as CEO of Community Professional Loudspeakers...
Bo Engberg was asked by a guitarist friend if he would please build a better amplifier. That one request from a friend change the direction of his career because Bo soon discovered he really enjoyed the inner workings of the amp and thought of a few ways he could improve on the design and...
Bob Moses watched his dad on the workbench in the garage and asked if he could help out on small projects. His father was an electrical engineer who worked for 3M on several digital projects, and both father and son worked together on improving their own stereo equipment. After Bob graduated from...
Ilja Krumins is a co-founder of Gamechanger Audio. He was born in Latvia and studied music in London while playing rock, surf, and rockabilly in several bands he formed with his friends. A number of those friends got together over time to outline some improvements they wanted to see in their audio...