Issue 01 — Hello, and welcome to the noise floor
Learning to love the hum underneath everything
If you ever played a cassette tape, you heard it before the music started — that soft wash of sound in the half-second after you hit play, before the first note. A faint, steady hush underneath everything: the sound of the medium itself, breathing. Engineers spent decades trying to get rid of it. I spent most of my life learning to love it.
That hiss is the thing I want to talk about here. Not the headline. The texture underneath it. The detail you only catch when you lean in.
So before we get to any of that — hi. I’m Chad. Let me tell you why a grown man started a newsletter about listening.
I grew up inside sound before I had any say in the matter. My grandmother played piano and put my hands on the keys before I could spell. My grandfather kept a guitar and an amp in his attic and showed me my first three chords up there among the dust and the boxes. And my dad ran a radio network, which meant I grew up around microphones and speakers and tape machines the way other kids grow up around tools in a garage. By high school, I had my own radio show. By college, I was producing and editing, and designing sound for other people, and somewhere in a music conservatory in Phoenix, I figured out that the studio was where I wanted to spend my hours — on my own terms, eventually, which is how Sound On // Sound Off came to be back in 2016.
That’s the résumé version. The truer version is simpler: I have spent thirty years convinced that the way something sounds is doing far more work on us than we give it credit for. The pacing of a podcast. The room tone under a film scene. The reverb tail that tells you a piano is alone in a big empty hall. We feel all of it, mostly without noticing. My whole job — and, increasingly, my whole way of moving through the world — is noticing.
Which brings me to what this is.
Tape Hiss is a short letter, every other week, about sound, music, and listening well. My hope is that you can read it over a cup of coffee and walk away from it wanting to put something on, or wanting to step outside and hear your own street a little differently. There’s a real fear, I think, in how much good audio exists now — the sense that there’s too much, that you’ll never find the good stuff, that you’ll just keep replaying the same forty songs or listening to the same podcast until you die. I’d like to be a small antidote to that. Not a firehose. A curator with opinions and a low tolerance for the boring.
Every issue is built the same way, in three movements — the same path a sound takes through my studio:
Picked Up — something I heard out in the world and loved. In the Room — something I’m making or shaping right now, in the studio. Sent Out — something for you to go listen to, or a way to listen, for the next two weeks.
Heard it, made it, sending it on. Let me show you what I mean. Here’s a preview of all three.
If someone forwarded this to you and it sounds like your kind of thing, you can get the next one in your inbox, every other week.
Picked Up
Here’s a confession that will horrify some of you: I haven’t watched a single minute of BEEF Season 2. Not one. And I’ve listened to the soundtrack maybe a hundred times.
BEEF Season 2 (Original Soundtrack) — Finneas O’Connell
Listen: Apple · Tidal · Spotify
I want to make a case for a category of music I think is underrated and under-discussed, which is the working album — a record with enough energy and intrigue to keep you company while your hands are busy, but not so much personality that it elbows its way to the front and ruins your concentration. It’s a narrow lane. Most music fails it in one direction or the other: too sleepy to keep you moving, or too interesting to ignore. Finneas threads it perfectly here.
I know it threads it because I keep reaching for it without deciding to. It was the first thing I put on as I dozed off during takeoff on a recent flight. It woke me up gently on an early-morning walk a few days later, easing me into the day rather than jolting me. And yesterday, in a coffee shop loud enough to be useless, I put the noise-canceling headphones on, turned this up, and got two genuinely productive hours done. Three completely different jobs — sleep, walking, focus — and one record quietly handled all of them. That’s not nothing. That’s a craftsman who understands function, not just mood.
I'll watch the show eventually. You should put on the record now.
In the Room
Two things, this first time only — because the studio has two halves, and I want you to see both.
The half that’s mine. A piece I’m calling “Melting.” I started it back when Nashville was thawing out from that brutal ice storm this past winter — the one that shut the whole city down and then, days later, just quietly released its grip and dripped away. The track is the most me thing I make: piano, synth, and a great deal of reverb, which are, if I’m honest, the three ingredients in basically everything I’ll ever play you here. Consider this your warning.
(Hit play below to listen.)
(My dog has been the primary audience for this one so far. Her review was a long sigh and a relocation to the other room, which I’ve chosen to interpret generously.)
It does what its name does. It fades up out of near-silence, settles into a warm, low haze, and stays there — no big swells yanking you around, just a slow bloom that builds a little in the back half before it dissolves back into nothing at the end. It opens out of silence and melts back into it. It’s unfinished, and I’m sharing it anyway, because that’s part of the deal with this letter: you get to hear things while they’re still wet.
The half that’s other people’s. This past year, my team has been working with Vanderbilt University on their podcast Quantum Potential, and we recently put out an episode I’d been quietly excited about for weeks — a conversation between the show’s host, Provost C. Cybele Raver, and the author and “happiness professor” Arthur Brooks.
Brooks has become one of my favorite writers, so getting to live inside this conversation in the edit was a genuine treat. It also happened to be the episode where they announced that he’s leaving Harvard to come teach at Vanderbilt next fall, which is a lovely bit of news to get to be the ones carrying.
My team edited and mixed the episode (above) and built the video trailer (below). The work there is invisible when it’s done right — the point is that you stop thinking about the sound and just lean toward two smart people talking. That’s the whole job.
Sent Out
No assignment this time, just an invitation.
For the next two weeks, I want you to find the hiss. Not on a record — in a room. The hum of your refrigerator. The specific pitch of your car on the highway. The sound your house makes at 11pm when everyone else is asleep. We spend so much energy filtering this stuff out that we forget it’s a soundtrack too, playing constantly, scoring our lives whether we’re listening or not.
Pick one. Just once. Stop filtering, and actually hear it.
Then tell me what you found. I read everything.
Until the next one — keep your ears open.
Chad
p.s. — Here’s the thing about tape hiss: it isn’t really “up high” at all. It’s broadband — smeared across the whole spectrum. But we hear it as hiss because our ears are most sensitive right in the 2 to 8 kHz range, the band where presence and clarity live. So the noise isn’t hiding up there. Our attention is. The ghost in the machine turned out to be sitting exactly where we listen hardest. I think about that more than is probably healthy.
Loved reading, listening, and experiencing this first issue with a hand built mug of great coffee! I’ll be paying even more attention to the hiss and rhythms of life. Thank you, Chad!
Gorgeous. So damn good. I'm glad you're doing this and to be here for it!