Rob told me he had a bunch of cassettes that he wasn’t able to listen to because they were recorded on a 4 track and his 4 track had long since bit the dust. I set up my recording gear so we could play the tapes in my Tascam and digitize them on computer. He showed up with several plastic bags full of tapes. Some were labeled, some weren’t. What is here are the best of those songs.

Most exciting to us was finding the song So We Ran. This is a song that Rob wrote and our friends Katie and Karolina recorded vocals on. I may have played the acoustic guitar on it??? There are more songs with Katie, Karolina, and Rob in the High School 4 Track section of the website.

One of Rob’s signatures is finger drums. He plays drums on a keyboard using the percussion settings on the keys. You can hear that being done throughout many of the songs here. He had a Yamaha Djx keyboard, the first version he said. It can also be found all over the High School 4 Track recordings. That keyboard had a lot of really good beats that weren’t all super cheezy.

Love You and Carnivorous Kittens were recorded at my house right after I moved in. Rob was often in the neighborhood because his girlfriend at the time, now wife, worked at a coffee shop that was only a block away. Carnivorous Kittens was a song that I wrote, Rob added the finger drums.

We had to do some research to figure out what type of 4 track he had. We are pretty sure it was a Yamaha MT400. Luckily it records using the same tape speed as Portastudios so we were able to play tapes recorded on it back still. Its kind of funny (but not really) that cassette 4 tracks go for more now, than they cost new back in the day.

He used mostly Shure sm57 microphones. I think he may have also had one of the radio shack omni dynamic mics that was make by Shure. I actually ended up buying a couple of these later on because they sound so good and are cheap.

We only got through about half of the tapes. So there may be more music coming in the future...