Donald Fagen – The Nightfly

Used "on the early Steely Dan records", as stated by Fagen in this August 2006 Sound on Sound interview.

Donald Fagen's interest in the ins and outs of recording technology might have grown in recent years, but when it comes to the tools of his trade — keyboards — the opposite is true. "From an instrument point of view, I find that the technical developments in keyboards since the '70s are not worth talking about. I experimented with all sorts of synthesizers at the time. I recall that my first synthesizer was an ARP Odyssey, which I used on the early Steely Dan records. Somebody gave me a Synergy and that had some interesting sounds that I used on The Nightfly."

At 1:10 in this interview with Fagen for the documentary Down the Rhodes: The Fender Rhodes Story, which was bonus footage published on YouTube on October 5, 2012, he reveals that it was an "early" Odyssey (and, therefore, the Rev1) and that is was destroyed.

Well here's a synthesizer story to go along with my antipathy towards synthesizers. There was an early commercial synthesizer called the ARP Odyssey, which was a, uh... uh, it was kind of a useful thing, it uh... Early analog synthesizer. It looked like, it was this kind of square little board that had a lot of switches on it and... it wasn't very flexible. You could do a few things with it. You know, you had a little ring modulator and stuff like that and the problem with a lot of those early analog synthesizers is they go out of tune, like, especially after a few six months or seven months, the, I don't know, something about the oscillators or the resistors or something and they start to drift like, you'd be doing a take and five minutes into the take, it would be a little flat. You'd have to retune and if after you'd had it for a year, like after five seconds they'd start to drift, you know, and I got so frustrated with this ARP Odyssey that I... You know, it's really into what I was doing, you know when you're doing a take, you're concentrating, and this started to happen so that, you know, I just, you know, took the thing and smashed it. You know, my rage got the better of me and then my partner started making suggestions as to what else we might do to the ARP Odyssey and, you know, we ended up getting lighter fluid and, you know, we set it on fire, we deface it in any other number of ways and then we went out on the balcony of the ABC Dunhill Records and just dropped it off the balcony and, um... the guy who ran the studio thought it was so funny that he had it framed and just like, it looked like artwork because it was essentially a destroyed musical instrument and he framed it and put it up in a studio hall there for everybody to laught at. [laughs]

Used on The Nightfly, as stated by Fagen in this August 2006 Sound on Sound interview.

Donald Fagen's interest in the ins and outs of recording technology might have grown in recent years, but when it comes to the tools of his trade — keyboards — the opposite is true. "From an instrument point of view, I find that the technical developments in keyboards since the '70s are not worth talking about. I experimented with all sorts of synthesizers at the time. I recall that my first synthesizer was an ARP Odyssey, which I used on the early Steely Dan records. Somebody gave me a Synergy and that had some interesting sounds that I used on The Nightfly."

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."