Donald Fagen

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."

Fagen is known to have used two different 8078s in his career. The first, owned and later sold by him, was used to record and mix Aja, according to this May 2019 Reddit post.

ColbyKill I can currently enrolled in The Blackbird Academy in Nashville, Tennessee. If you haven't heard of it, should definitely check it out. So this console used to belong to Donald. John McBride, Martina's husband, had bought it from him a few years ago now. It has been slightly modified, but it is pretty much exactly how it was while they were using it to record Aja. Its amazing to be able to get to be in the same room let along get to work on it as well. Figured y'all would enjoy seeing this.

The second was the in-house console at the now defunct Clinton Recording Studios. It was used to record and mix Morph the Cat, as stated by Fagen and mix engineer Elliott Scheiner in this August 2006 Sound on Sound interview.

Scheiner adds that he 'seldom' uses EQ during the mix, and that Morph The Cat was recorded via Clinton's Neve 8078 directly to analogue 24-track. Straightforward recording to analogue without much processing is now Fagen's favoured approach, says he. "It's the sound I like. It's not necessary to have the latest equipment. Today I think that I could use any studio, and any equipment, and all I need is good players and it will sound good. I like the sound of jazz records recorded in the late 1950s. I love the sound of Rudy van Gelder's records for Prestige. I can't imagine anything sounding better. Van Gelder's jazz recordings definitely influenced the Steely Dan recording and mixing style."