Donald Fagen – Kamakiriad
The music gear and equipment used by the artists, producers, engineers, and more involved in the making of the 1993 album Kamakiriad.
Music from Kamakiriad
Artists on Kamakiriad
Gear Used On Kamakiriad
Explore the instruments, equipment, software, and production tools used in the making of Donald Fagen – Kamakiriad (1993). Click more on each item to see exactly how it was used.
Donald Fagen
Roles:
Studio Equipment used by Donald Fagen on Kamakiriad
Avg price: $14.50
An original version was used on "Hey Nineteen", while the Wendel-II was used on The Nightfly, as stated by Fagen in this August 2006 Sound on Sound interview and clarified on Nichols' official history page for the Wendel, respectively.
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."
