theAudience said:

Great clip on the recording of Peg from the...



...Classic Albums DVD



Music for adventurous listeners

tA

Tribal Records

It's so interesting that they never really had a band. I know they used some of the same guys again like Michael McDonald & Larry Carlton, but still to pull it off and make such complex stuff so consistent and simple and accessible is a real feat

[Edited 8/1/11 20:08pm]

shorttrini said:

No, but they came close with, "Everything Must Go", there follow up to "Two Against Nature". It was not horrible, but it was not great. It seems like they rushed it. As for them being, "underrated", I they are my favorite group so I am biased when I say that in some ways, yes. Donald Fagen, is one of the greatest storytellers of all time.

[Edited 7/31/11 6:27am]

"Pixeleen" saved Two Against Nature from being forever banished to the kids' table of the "Danon."

NDRU said:

The Nightfly is a little difficult for me simply because it sounds as if it was created in a sterile laboratory environment. Steely Dan has always been clean, but...that's not to say it's bad, it's just that normally I am a fan of their production in addition to their music.

Two against nature is pretty sterile, too, but I like it more than the Nightfly.

Interesting comment.
I've heard the "too clean" & "sterile" arguments leveled against them before.

And honestly, i'm not sure I understand what's being said. Please elaborate.

I hear precision (clear/defined arrangements) and restraint (in not over-producing the tunes, maintaining some space/air) in both those albums.



Music for adventurous listeners

tA

Tribal Records

namepeace said:

"Pixeleen" saved Two Against Nature from being forever banished to the kids' table of the "Danon."

I think you meant Everything Must Go.

C'mon bruh-man, Pixeleen is devine but there's more.




...Lunch With Gina & Godwhacker




Music for adventurous listeners

tA

Tribal Records

theAudience said:

NDRU said:

The Nightfly is a little difficult for me simply because it sounds as if it was created in a sterile laboratory environment. Steely Dan has always been clean, but...that's not to say it's bad, it's just that normally I am a fan of their production in addition to their music.

Two against nature is pretty sterile, too, but I like it more than the Nightfly.

Interesting comment.
I've heard the "too clean" & "sterile" arguments leveled against them before.

And honestly, i'm not sure I understand what's being said. Please elaborate.

I hear precision (clear/defined arrangements) and restraint (in not over-producing the tunes, maintaining some space/air) in both those albums.



Music for adventurous listeners

tA

Tribal Records

I actually see what he's saying, but I sometimes like that "clean" sound. I just wish that sometimes the drum were a little dirtier & harder in their music. Other than that, I'm good

theAudience said:

namepeace said:

"Pixeleen" saved Two Against Nature from being forever banished to the kids' table of the "Danon."

I think you meant Everything Must Go.

C'mon bruh-man, Pixeleen is devine but there's more.




...Lunch With Gina & Godwhacker




Music for adventurous listeners

tA

Tribal Records

Yes I made that mistake. EMG, Not TAN (an album that was better than some give it credit for).

Remember, tA, we're talking about the Dan. Most artists' best don't match up with the last on their list.

Tittypants said:

theAudience said:

Interesting comment.
I've heard the "too clean" & "sterile" arguments leveled against them before.

And honestly, i'm not sure I understand what's being said. Please elaborate.

I hear precision (clear/defined arrangements) and restraint (in not over-producing the tunes, maintaining some space/air) in both those albums.



Music for adventurous listeners

tA

Tribal Records

I actually see what he's saying, but I sometimes like that "clean" sound. I just wish that sometimes the drum were a little dirtier & harder in their music. Other than that, I'm good

Yes, the Nightfly album is maybe a bit more keyboard heavy than their other stuff. Maybe that is part of the difference I am hearing (and I admit I am not as familiar with this album, maybe haven't given it enough of a chance).

But by sterile, it's not the arrangements or performances, it's the actual sound of the instruments. It sounds very shallow, like there are no overtones. The drum sound is particularly weak. I mean, I don't know if the horns are really horns, the bass is really bass...and the guitar is really thin like a lot of other 80's pop records.

It is almost too perfect, bordering on MIDI sounding. Like he took no risk of human error or extraneous noise messing up the recording. But along with those real elements that cause noise, you tend to get dynamics and depth of tone.

It is certainly well done, and the music itself is good (have always liked New Frontier), but it does not have the organic feel that the Steely Dan records have IMO. Those albums were clean, but the guitar was beefy, there were acoustic instruments, nice bass, horns drums, etc.

I could also argue that the old albums swung more too, but that is another argument for another day.

NDRU said:

Tittypants said:

I actually see what he's saying, but I sometimes like that "clean" sound. I just wish that sometimes the drum were a little dirtier & harder in their music. Other than that, I'm good

Yes, the Nightfly album is maybe a bit more keyboard heavy than their other stuff. Maybe that is part of the difference I am hearing (and I admit I am not as familiar with this album, maybe haven't given it enough of a chance).

But by sterile, it's not the arrangements or performances, it's the actual sound of the instruments. It sounds very shallow, like there are no overtones. The drum sound is particularly weak. I mean, I don't know if the horns are really horns, the bass is really bass...and the guitar is really thin like a lot of other 80's pop records.

It is almost too perfect, bordering on MIDI sounding. Like he took no risk of human error or extraneous noise messing up the recording. But along with those real elements that cause noise, you tend to get dynamics and depth of tone.

It is certainly well done, and the music itself is good (have always liked New Frontier), but it does not have the organic feel that the Steely Dan records have IMO. Those albums were clean, but the guitar was beefy, there were acoustic instruments, nice bass, horns drums, etc.

I could also argue that the old albums swung more too, but that is another argument for another day.

I hear you.
On that count i'll defer to long-time SD engineer Roger Nichols (RIP) who also dealt with those impressions.


BS: By that time, they have a good idea what they're after, right?
RN: It's amazing, my mouth still hangs open. They seem to know what's going to fill a little hole in a chorus that won't be recorded for a year. I don't know how they do it. I don't know if they know how they do it either, but they do. It makes it very easy to work. We never have to do things over again because of arrangement problems or because one instrument conflicts with another. Stuff will get done over again because a player's style won't match the tune, or a player's execution isn't good enough, or the horn section is out of tune, or something like that.

BS: How did Fagen and Becker get so much out of jaded session musicians?
RN: It's like the musical Olympics. Here's a musician whose style and capability they know, and they'll push him to ten percent beyond his limits. Just the chords they've written and the things they have in their mind; maybe Larry Carlton's not used to playing these scales over these chords. Another big factor is that we don't care how long it takes. The musicians will say, 'Hey, I'm really sorry it's taking so long. It's a great idea, I'm trying to execute it,' and we say, 'We don't care how long you take.' It's all constructively done, and it just takes a long time to do it. But every time somebody comes out, they say they've never played that well in their lives. And then they always want to come back.

BS: As Steely Dan's records grew more mature, the complaint began to be heard that they were too perfect, that the raw edges had been homogenized out. How do you feel about that?
RN: We achieved perfection and abandoned it on the second album all in one evening. I remember mixing "King of the World." Everyone else went home; Gary Katz fell asleep on the floor and Denny Dias and I stayed until seven in the morning, doing it in little sections, getting the balance between all the instruments perfect, then on to the next section, all of it perfect. Then we spliced the 2-track master sections together, which is how we used to mix down before we got the Necam digital mixing system. The next afternoon we came to the studio and played it back; the song started, and then the fade came. We went, 'Wait a minute. Did we leave something out? What's going on here?' And we played it back again and we had to really concentrate to realize the song was going by. You could hear everything, but you couldn't hear anything, like sonic wallpa-per- really strange. We ended up using the mix we'd done ten hours before which had more three-dimensionality to it.

BS: Tell us about Wendel, the drum machine you designed.
RN: We found that there were certain feels that we couldn't get out of real drummers -- they weren't steady enough. So we had to design something that would do it perfectly, but with some human feeling, the right amount of layback. Instead of just one high-hat sound that repeats machine-like over and over, we had sixteen different ones, so it had the inflections. Wendel can play exactly what the drummer plays -- if he plays a little early or a little hard, Wendel plays it a little early or a little hard. Play it once, Wendel memorizes the song, then you play it again and it repeats what it hears.

Excerpts from a 1993 interview: http://www.granatino.com/...ichols.htm
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Probably a lot of what you're detecting with the drums has to due with this use of WENDEL/WENDEL II samplers.
That machine is all over The Nightfly album. Even though there are drummers credited on every track, so is WENDEL II.

Sequencing, percussion and special effects: Roger Nichols and WENDEL II

Eventually using "Schmuck Tools!" [Pro-Tools] (and that's Walter Becker's term)

Guitar.com: You all do a lot of digital editing now with....
Becker: Schmuck Tools! Yes, ProTools. We do. And we are doing essentially the same things we have done with other devices before, like Roger Nichols' program called Wendel. In the 90s it was overtaken by commercial programs.

http://www.guitar.com/art...t-all-odds
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

On both Fagen's first two solo albums, The Nightfly and Kamakiriad, mention is made of the use of sampling technology, while Morph The Cat has none of it. What has changed? "We started using sequencing and stuff on [Steely Dan's] Gaucho," replies Fagen, "out of desperation really. We were having trouble laying down 'Hey Nineteen'. We tried it with two different bands and it still didn't work, so one of us said something like 'It's too bad that we can't get a machine to play the beat we want, with full-frequency drum sounds, and to be able to move the snare drum and kick drum around independently.' Roger [Nichols] replied 'I can do that.' This was back in 1978 or something, so we said 'You can do that???' To which he said 'Yes, all I need is $150,000.' So we gave him the money out of our recording budget, and six weeks later he came in with this machine and that is how it all started."

The pioneering machine was the now-legendary Wendel, reportedly based on a CompuPro S100 computer with an CPM/86 operating system. It was capable of replacing already recorded sounds and moving them around, rather than constructing a drum track from scratch. "This was in the days when digital was still very primitive," recalls Fagen. "Roger's machine did not even have any switches, it only had a regular computer keyboard and he had to type all these bytes out, huge lists of numbers, which took him 20 minutes, and at the end he would hit Return, and we heard this one snare a beat. It took so long. It got a little better during The Nightfly, but it was so horrible, I have tried to figure out how to get out of sampling ever since."

Excerpt from a 2006 SOS article: http://www.soundonsound.c.../fagen.htm
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

You have to remember that after around 1974, these guys started recording material that they never intended to play live. That being the case, wouldn't devote all your energies into making the best recording you could, thinking that was the only way these songs would ever be heard?

I give these guys a lot of respect for having a specific concept and vision (starting in the mind) and being able to fully manifest those ideas into reality, exactly as envisioned. Not easy.



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Tribal Records

i always liked these

[Edited 8/2/11 13:35pm]

theAudience said:

You have to remember that after around 1974, these guys started recording material that they never intended to play live. That being the case, wouldn't devote all your energies into making the best recording you could, thinking that was the only way these songs would ever be heard?

I give these guys a lot of respect for having a specific concept and vision (starting in the mind) and being able to fully manifest those ideas into reality, exactly as envisioned. Not easy.



Music for adventurous listeners

tA

Tribal Records

Yes, certainly they have a track record for doing it right. I can't imagine another band blending the technical aspects with pop sensibilites as well as them.

But music is always a process whose outcome is not always apparent until somewhere down the road. You might think you are on to something, then the next day the result is terrible.

I can see where geeking out can get you to a place where you are designing a drum machine that can mimic the imperfections of a human, but I am not sure that particular example succeeded in making the best recordings they could have made. There is no flaw that I can point out, but it still seems to be missing something aesthetically.

And I find it hard to believe a real drummer could not do Hey Nineteen as well as a machine. Maybe the studio geeking out was taken a little too far IMO. That may show in in how history views those albums compared to Aja, Katy Lied, etc. I'm not against drum machines, either, just in this kind of music, a real drummer seems more appropriate (again, just to my personal tastes).

But I wasn't there, and really, who am I to say they made a mistake? They're Steely Dan and I am a guy typing so he can avoid his job for a few minutes

dalsh327 said:

There's also a bunch of demos out there that they've said they have no plans on releasing.

There's a set of demos from 68-70 called the Catalyst Demos which were released to record stores, and repackaged way too many times. Some of these songs would wind up on the first 4 or 5 albums. They get no royalty money from these recordings, they're pretty easy to find though.

There was a soundtrack to a little known movie called "You Got To Walk It Like You Talk It" from 1970 which had Richard Pryor and "Red Shoes Diaries" creator Zalman King in the movie. And Robert Downey Sr.... and it was one of the first movies horror director Wes Craven ever worked on. This was Steely Dan's first recording, and has also been repackaged and re-released over the years. Fagen sings on a couple of songs.

The first single they put out is not on any album or compilation. You can find it pretty easily, and might even go "why don't they include it on "Can't Buy a Thrill?"" It's called "Dallas" and "Sail the Waterway".

They didn't tour for long, but there's about 3 or 4 soundboard bootlegs from the 1974 tour. They're all great, one's a radio concert, and the others are from England and Irvine. There's also one that was recorded in Santa Monica which the band released the live "Bodhishatva", but they've never released the rest of the concert.

There's demos on the various sites for Katy Lied & Royal Scam demos and outtakes. Aja didn't have much in the way of outtakes and demos, but Gaucho had a significant amount.

How these demos got out to the public? I think Becker leaked them himself. When they put "Citizen" box set out, they went through the demos and didn't feel they were worth putting on there. He knows they'd wind up in the hands of fans, and not bootleggers who would charge people money to buy them.

Good info.




...Dog Eat Dog (from that You Got To Walk It Like You Talk It Or You'll Lose That Beat flick)


I've got the 1974 bootleg of a Record Plant performance...



...Bodhisattva (opening number)

Music for adventurous listeners

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Tribal Records

Interesting commentary on Steely Dan and the above Record Plant performance...

In the movie Knocked Up, there’s a scene where the characters played by Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd (playing an A&R man) argue about Steely Dan. I think the exact line that Seth Rogen says is that “Steely Dan gargle balls.” It’s a funny scene, but I’ll admit that as I watched it in the theater, there was a part of me that wanted to shut his bitch ass up. Because Steely Dan are awesome.

Why are they awesome? Because they sound so goddamned good. I’ve listened to their songs hundreds, if not thousands of times and I can’t tell you what any of the lyrics are about, except they always occur to me though they’re about peering into the abyss that Nietzsche wrote about – and laughing at it. But their arrangements are so impeccable, their playing so beautiful and the production on their records so stunning (Has anyone made better sounding albums than Steely Dan?) that my affection for their music grows deeper the more I listen.

I know plenty of people that disagree with my assessment. My friend Lewis, who loves soul music as I do, argues with me about the Dan, accusing them of being soulless. I disagree. Vehemently. Steely Dan are what I call weirdo soul; musicians continually inspired by jazz, blues and soul but far too self-conscious to play black music on its own terms. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were geeky hipsters incarnate, 70’s style; smart, bookish, loaded with irony, but never so much that it overwhelmed the obvious reverence and love they had of black music. That’s the weakness of most hipster acts today; they lead with the irony and the love of the music comes in a distant second. Not so with the Dan.

Today’s episode of Bootleg Friday is a great Steely Dan show taped at the Record Plant in Los Angeles on March 20, 1974, promoting the release of Pretzel Logic, a masterpiece in every sense of the word. If you’re already a fan, then you’ll be in love with what you hear. If you’re not, I ask you to set aside whatever your opinions have been – at least for a few songs. I just don’t get it – how can anyone not like this music?

~Ben Lazar
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=


Music for adventurous listeners

tA

Tribal Records

NDRU said:

Tittypants said:

I actually see what he's saying, but I sometimes like that "clean" sound. I just wish that sometimes the drum were a little dirtier & harder in their music. Other than that, I'm good

Yes, the Nightfly album is maybe a bit more keyboard heavy than their other stuff. Maybe that is part of the difference I am hearing (and I admit I am not as familiar with this album, maybe haven't given it enough of a chance).

But by sterile, it's not the arrangements or performances, it's the actual sound of the instruments. It sounds very shallow, like there are no overtones. The drum sound is particularly weak. I mean, I don't know if the horns are really horns, the bass is really bass...and the guitar is really thin like a lot of other 80's pop records.

It is almost too perfect, bordering on MIDI sounding. Like he took no risk of human error or extraneous noise messing up the recording. But along with those real elements that cause noise, you tend to get dynamics and depth of tone.

It is certainly well done, and the music itself is good (have always liked New Frontier), but it does not have the organic feel that the Steely Dan records have IMO. Those albums were clean, but the guitar was beefy, there were acoustic instruments, nice bass, horns drums, etc.

I could also argue that the old albums swung more too, but that is another argument for another day.

I agree. The tones of the instruments are sterile. Especially drums.

Being an engineer myself, I think that it is no coincidence that this is "one of the first fully digital recordings of popular music." Quoted from Wikipedia.

It's definitely possible to record interesting and organic sounding synths, Prince himself achieved it during the 80's, so I don't think that is the issue.

That album desperately needs some overdriven tape IMO! Thicken those drums and give some harmonic distortion and depth to the synth tones!

I'd take a decent tape machine over digital recording any day. Its just got great vibe and tone.

My goodness that's some mighty fine music! Is there anybody ...I mean ANYBODY of this generation capable of making something that special! I think my fav is Time Out of Mine...maybe Jack of Speed.

...

I remember when someone reviewed Donald Fagen's Kamikiriad in Bass Player magazine, and they thought that Walter Becker's basslines were stiff and unimaginative. I'm not sure what they mean, really... I thought they were perfect for the tunes, especially on Florida Room and Snowbound...I dig the bounce here...

I submit the following:

...

[Edited 8/4/11 1:15am]

paligap said:

...

I remember when someone reviewed Donald Fagen's Kamikiriad in Bass Player magazine, and they thought that Walter Becker's basslines were stiff and unimaginative. I'm not sure what they mean, really... I thought they were perfect for the tunes, especially on Florida Room and Snowbound...I dig the bounce here...

I submit the following:

...

[Edited 8/4/11 1:15am]

DOPE!!!