James Shawcross dives under the panels of a Kawai piano as eagerly as a gearhead dives under the hood of a 1965 Stingray.

The 11-year old from Lake Wildwood, thin and sporting a shock of blonde hair, jams a finger at the inner workings of the instrument to point out the strings he's fixed, using terms familiar only to those dedicated to the craft of fixing such things.

A whir of energy, James pops up almost immediately after indicating the problem and recounts, step-by-step, the fix for a key on the piano that was buzzing “like a baby wasp, learning to fly,” he said. He's got a story of a fix, or a challenging tuning, for a number of the seven pianos tucked into the Shawcross living room.

Altogether the family has 15 pianos, and an organ James is learning to play. His mother, Julie, is a piano teacher, and father, Charles, fixes pianos as a hobby, one that he's handed down to his son.

James' talents don't start with the mechanical prowess, though.

He won the piano company Roland's Atelier Organ Festival national youth title this May with a piece he performed. He's placed in competitions hosted by the Auburn Symphony and ragtime performances in Sacramento.

He's progressed so quickly since he began to play, shortly before he turned six, that Charles drives James to Carmichael, Calif., to find a teacher suiting his skill set, a former instructor at a conservatory in San Francisco.

“I knew, maybe three weeks after he started to play, just watching how quickly his hands moved across the keys, that he was doing things I could never do,” said Charles Shawcross, a self-professed music fan but novice player.

James plays haunting tunes he wrote himself, Chopin's Minute Waltz and “Great Balls of Fire,” on an organ, nearly attacking it with his zeal for music.

Charles encourages his son to tinker with his pianos to round out his understanding of the instrument, he said.

“If you really want to perform well, you have to understand the instrument,” Charles added.

Charles continues on in this vein, but James cuts him off, eager to get to the next point of conversation.

“OK Dad, OK,” James said, switching from Chopin and piano pedals to his adventures in building and flying paper planes over large chasms, an activity he enjoyed on his visit to Las Vegas from a hotel balcony.

“It was totally awesome,” James said. “It was like daylight at nighttime there. I could watch TV out of my hotel window. I threw the paper airplane out the window... and it almost dive-bombed someone at the pool.”

That he was enthralled with the big lights of that entertainment capitol seems fitting for James, who plays to the cameras with a toothy grin in photos of his performances posted on his website (www.aloveofmusic.com).

He straddles the bench between the keyboards of two pianos and begins to play the same song simultaneously with one hand on either instrument. It's endearing exhibitionism, a display of the precocious talent he practices an hour each day.

If James gets too full of himself, Charles knows how to playfully tweak his ego. Quizzed as to what music he likes to listen to, James pauses mid-whirlwind and seems stumped.

“You like that girl's song... the one you have the crush on,” Charles says, playfully.

“Dad! Dad!” James shoots back, trying in vain to shush his father from revealing his crush, one Taylor Swift.

The mention of the country music star's name gives James a thought, though, and he sprints across the living room to the organ and begins to bang out a country tune.

That wild energy is James' gift, and sometimes, a problem, Charles said. The soon-to-be Mt. St. Mary's Elementary sixth grader can have difficulty focusing, he added.

“He's capable of doing so well at school” but he bores easily, Charles said.

It's certainly not for lack of smarts. Charles and Julie Shawcross are raising James without TV, so he occupies his mind when not practicing music by reading encyclopedias, front to back.

“If I don't have something in particular I want to read, I just do like this with my hand,” he said, zipping it across the tops of a set. “And I pick one out.”

Those hands.

They are constantly in motion, whether it's on the piano, deftly popping an encyclopedia out of its place or catching lizards, frogs and toads — a favorite pastime. He isn't so enthused about learning vocal music at school, but has found he likes to sing and hum while chasing down reptiles and amphibians on his jaunts outdoors, grasping in the dirt with the hands that produce such beautiful music.

He would like to use those hands to get him into a top-flight conservatory some day for musical study, he said.

And after that?

“James loves the spotlight, he wants to be famous,” Charles said.

A video and audio recording of James' performances will be attached to this story Thursday.

To contact Staff Writer Kyle Magin, e-mail kmagin@theunion.com or call (530) 477-4239.