Looking Outwards – 10

For this week’s Looking Outwards, I decided to dive deeper into the Drum Machine used in Steely Dan’s 1980 album Gaucho. By this time the band was quite popular and had access to the best studio musicians in the country to assist in their recordings, but found that often even they weren’t capable of the specificity that the band desired. In 1978 while recording, they contracted Roger Nichols to create their own high quality digital sampling drum machine, Wendel, for recordings on the album. This happened a whole two years before the release of the groundbreaking Roland TR-808 and 909, and the 1978 recordings set an example of what was to come in the next decade.