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Quitting Tours Boosted Creative Control And Sales
- Stopping touring let Fagen and Becker pursue greater sonic control and improved record sales.
- Fagen says sales actually rose after they quit touring, enabling obsessive studio refinement with selected session players.
Building A Custom Drum Machine To Save A Track
- Engineer Roger Nichols built a custom primitive drum sampler when available machines lacked fidelity, funded from the album budget.
- Nichols typed beats manually; Fagen remembers giving him ~$200,000 and waiting weeks for the machine to arrive.
Hybrid Use Of Live Takes And Early Sampling
- Steely Dan blended live tracking with sampling: they recorded full takes, then sampled and credited the drummer when necessary.
- Fagen emphasized doing the track live first and sampling only if the live part failed.