Wendel: How Steely Dan invented a drum machine
As the 1980s began to come into its own as a decade, modern music’s sound was dominated by synthesisers and drum machines. With rapidly evolving technology coming to the fore, the music world entered a new era of digital revolution. It’s probably for the best that Steely Dan never got on the 808 train – their dedication to analogue and lush instrumental tones would have seemed brittle and cold in the synthesiser age.
But in reality, Steely Dan were pioneers when it came to drum machine technology. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were notorious taskmasters and perfectionists, often hiring entire bands of musicians for studio sessions only to bring in a completely new lineup for a different take. Their quest to perfect even the smallest details had them bemoaning the lack of accuracy they could get from human drummers.
“We started using sequencing and stuff on [Steely Dan’s] Gaucho out of desperation really,” Fagen told Sound On Sound in 2006. “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.'”
That’s when recording engineer Roger Nichols claimed that he could do that very thing. “Roger replied, ‘I can do that.’ This was back in 1978 or something, so we said, ‘You can do that???'” Fagen remembered. “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.”
Cracking into a CompuPro S100 computer, Nichols eventually built a drum machine that allowed Steely Dan to replace already recorded sounds or move them around in different configurations rather than constructing a new drum track from scratch. Despite being a major technological breakthrough, the machine that was affectionately named “Wendel” took some time to use properly.
“This was in the days when digital was still very primitive,” Fagen added. “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.”
According to a 2021 interview with YouTuber Tyler Burns, Gaucho engineer Elliot Scheiner recalled that the drum tracks for ‘Hey Nineteen’, ‘Glamour Profession’, and ‘My Rival’ were all helmed by Wendel after taking in samples from live drummers. Bernard Purdie put down his signature “Purdie Shuffle” on ‘Babylon Sisters’, making it one of the few songs on the album to feature a live, unedited drum track.
In the album credits to Gaucho, “Wendel” is listed as providing sequencing and special effects. When the album sold one million copies in the US, a platinum record was pressed especially for “Wendel”.
Check out ‘Hey Nineteen’ down below.
