Donald Fagen

Mentioned in this May 2006 Keyboard interview with Scott Healy.

SH: So what’s the secret formula for your trademark phasey Rhodes sound?

DF: The trademark is, first you try and find those little orange boxes, I forget what they’re called, and if you can’t find the little orange boxes [MXR Phase 90s] from the late sixties, and if you can’t get them you go get the big orange boxes from a slightly later period, and—

SH: Phase shifters—

DF: –they’re just phasers, that’s all they do, and you use two of them, so they’re stereo, and you keep ‘em on a slow pace, and that’s about it.

SH: Sometimes the effect is like you’ve got them on a trigger pedal–

DF: It’s all random.

SH: That’s cool. And on some of the tunes, obviously, the Rhodes is straight.

DF: Right. I like the phasers, because they even out the signal, for some tunes, especially if you want it to sound a little more like an organ tone, or you need to sustain things a certain way, with a kind of compression, they’re useful, it makes it less boring, because you’re hearing some modulation or something. It’s a nice sound.

SH: So the stereo thing, with the two of them, that’s the secret, ‘cuz you can hear it with the headphones for sure.

DF: Yeah, they modulate with each other—

SH: They’re not exactly locked in together, so you don’t get that predictable back and forth sweep.

DF: And it’s random, so it’s not like some kind of synthesizer. On the attack sometimes you get some random nice little whops.

SH: That’s why I though there might some kind of a wa pedal—

DF: No, no, it’s more often than not you’ll get some kind of interesting thing happen on the attack.

SH: That’s really cool.

DF: You gotta kind of whop the keyboard, too.