What’s that song?
The first instrument I remember playing is a broken old upright piano that we had in the basement when I was a kid. It was once a player piano and lived in a local store. When my Grandmother refinished it’s exterior someone had the idea to scrap the gears and motor, leaving it only somewhat playable. After it was given to the family in the early 1950’s it was wheeled down the street to their second story apartment where my Mom learned to play it.
By the time I got my hands on it in the mid 1970’s the keys were water damaged and very hard to press down properly. I had to bang on it to get much sound out of it. I don’t remember that I wrote anything with it, but I definitely got some ideas from playing around with it.
A few years later after acquiring a cheap classical guitar, a Casiotone, and a tape recorder I was on the way to building a library of songs and incidental music. Fast forward further to 1990 or thereabouts when I began releasing limited edition cassette tapes filled with the lo-fi renditions I was recording of my compositions and those of some film-student friends. The label which I called Tape Hiss Recordings had a nice run through the early 2010’s but no longer distributes tapes or CDs.*
In 2015 I began cataloging my unreleased songs and instrumental pieces so that they might be licensed by other artists and / or reworked for future release.** Also in 2015 and 2017 I took a couple of online courses in songwriting and production from Berklee College Of Music and studied as many books, podcasts, videos, etc on the subject as I could digest. Since then I have been writing up a storm and slowly poring over nearly thirty years of old notes and demos, starting to relearn to read music and working through a lot of songs.
Scott Carr
December 2023
*A number of old Tape Hiss Recordings releases can be streamed or purchased through the links here.
**Want to talk about licensing a song I’ve written? Please get in touch by clicking on one of the links on the CONNECT page.
I look forward to hearing from you.
