I would argue that, by necessity, the first question trumps the others, but doesn’t render them obsolete. “I usually come up with germinal musical idea, and then we will arrange to meet…,” Fagen told the New York Times. It was released on September 23, 1977 by ABC Records. On Aja, Becker and Fagen integrated their diverse musical influences more effortlessly than ever before. You never have to drive through Watts, say. Meadows’s remasters were sourced from Nichols’s 1982 digital tapes. When a mishap with the new DBX noise-reduction system damaged the Katy Lied tapes, the band undertook herculean efforts to fix the snafu and were devastated when the album’s original fidelity couldn’t be completely restored. All 7 of the CD’s were remastered at that time to update ALL CD releases. The box set was simply a re-edit adjusting sequence to match that provided by MCA to fit on 4 CD’s. It was the band's first platinum album and ultimately became their best-selling studio release, eventually selling over 5 … And if you read Breithaupt’s book or watch the Classic Albums documentary, it becomes clear that every song on Aja has a compelling story, because every note and every word was intentional. As a result of their snowballing perfectionism and unlimited access to L.A.’s top players, Becker and Fagen’s own musical role on Aja diminished. Since CDs preserved all the characteristics of the original master tape, I could now enjoy music without the drawbacks of black vinyl. Then I get melodic and bluesy,” Graydon told Newsweek in 2017. “The whole thing probably took about four, five hours…. Walter Becker. The band stopped touring and focused on songwriting and recording. Not realizing that there were NO copies of the Ludwig created masters in their files, the studios pulled the 15IPS Dolby EQ tape copies, and transferred THOSE tapes to the Sony digital tapes, and sent those to the US plant(s) for replication. Plus, the vinyl rips are all unofficial releases, which isn’t something I want to get into (beyond the odd need for a vinyl comparison, like this case), for ethical and practical reasons.Â, The lineage info for the CSM rip says it’s the 1977 AB-1006 pressing. “We don’t construct them as puzzles,” Fagen claimed to Rolling Stone in 1977. “We try to tell a big story in a very short period of time. With Aja, I only recorded “Peg,” and that was one band.  still a working set of 3M digital recorders. Update your browser to view this website correctly. The former featured a minor hit about their time at Bard, “My Old School,” and latter spawned their biggest single, “Rikki Don't Lose That Number, which reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100. “It wouldn’t bother me at all not to play on my own album,” Becker told Crowe with utter seriousness.Â, “Around the time we made Aja we figured out what it was we sort of wanted to do, you know, musically,” Fagen explained in the Aja episode of the Classic Albums series. I could listen to Steely Dan all day and never understand all that is going on on those records. Some of the CDs listed have slightly different peak levels, and the track times on many differ slightly. “t is really a collaboration. “I thought Aja itself was dangerously ambitious,” Becker told Musician magazine in 1981. “I really did.”Â. I believe there’s an AA-1006 pressing. This was in the VERY early days of Digital recording. While “Deacon Blues,” “Aja,” and “Peg” are some of my favorites, deep cuts like “Home at Last” (which Fagen called “a little blues about Ulysses”) are just as good. The box set was simply a re-edit adjusting sequence to match that provided by MCA to fit on 4 CD’s. Although they had a track done, we got Johnny Mandel in to do the arrangement. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife and two cats. All mastering was done by myself, with the instructions to “pretend you’ve never heard the albums before, and do what you feel appropriate”, and we’ll listen and advise as you go along. Donald Fagen…has [the] pinched rectangular face of his photos, which…in person turns out to be dominated by an alarmingly long nose, wide mouth and high forehead, giving him the aspect, perhaps, of a mad scientist. “[‘Peg’] I think is infamous among studio players in that we hired a couple guitar players to play the solo,” Fagen said in the Classic Albums episode, “and it wasn’t quite what we were looking for until we got through three or four, five...six or seven, eight players.”, They tried Elliott Randall, who’d played the “Reelin’ in the Years” solo, along with former McCoy’s frontman Rick Derringer, who’d played on Countdown to Ecstasy and Katy Lied. But when information about the master tape or artist intent is knowable and when the album’s initial release wasn’t marred by poor production or mastering, it’s important to all of those factors take those factors into account, even if we filter them through the somewhat subjective lens of what sounds best to our ears today. I like my CD better than any other I have heard, including the MFSL. The funny thing about that single? Then I turn the monitor back up, so here’s this mix coming out of the speakers. It was so much sick s— that happened during that time period. But, overall, it’s very close to both of those masterings, as well as the original vinyl, as the GIF below — which rotates through several tracks on the MQA CD (faint pink), the Hoffman CD (purple), the Takiguchi CD (red), and the original vinyl (grey) — shows: All things considered, I’d now move the MQA CD into second place behind the Hoffman CD but slightly ahead of the Takiguchi mastering, thanks to the MQA CD’s slightly superior fidelity.  That’s what the final box set was created from. During the time of re-master, Roger, Walter and Donald were in Hawaii working on the final mixes/recoding ofÂ. Ultimately, none of the masterings can be considered overly compressed or “brickwalled.” A comparison of the waveforms of the Hoffman mastering (purple) and the Takiguchi mastering (red) shows that the latter is slightly louder and has ever so slightly shorter peaks, but is far from compressed2: There’s a better case for throwing out some of the masterings due to technical flaws.Â, Overall fidelity is not the issue, despite the constant kerfuffle over whether the analog masters or Nichols’s digital transfers should be used, debates about noise reduction, and uncertainty about what tape was used for the Japanese remaster. But on most tracks, Nichols’s ’84 mastering has more upper-midrange and treble than Hoffman’s, leading to a brighter sound, as the GIF below comparing Nichols’s (light blue) and Hoffman’s (purple) masterings of “Aja,” “Deacon Blues,” “Home at Last,” and “Peg” using Har-Bal’s “average power” graphs demonstrates: (click on image to see the animated comparison), Despite the significant differences in sound, it’s difficult to visually distinguish Hoffman-mastered ‘84 CDs from Nichols-mastered ‘84 CDs, since the liner notes don’t list the mastering engineer. Let’s start the whole mix again.” We did and that was the only thing that got redone by me. “They just told me to play what I felt…,” Christlieb told the Wall Street Journal. How did I miss that?” That’s the perfectionist in us. I didn’t get in the right spot,” and so we had to keep doing it over and over and over. They said, “Okay, so you put it in today. By The METAlliance These CDs were once again sourced from his 1982 digital transfers. For about an hour and a half, I’m playing my hip, melodic kind of jazz style. We strive for that sort of slick sound.” A side effect of the band’s embrace of “slickness” was that Becker and Fagen became the poster boys for the “L.A. I can start songs and Walter can finish them.”, The songwriting duo took their first serious stab at making a career of it when they left Bard and moved to New York City, harboring hopes of becoming Brill Building-style songwriters. 37214 also, but dunno if it is Mastering #3 or #4. Steely Dan were notorious perfectionists, and would edit take after take ... session, or the vocals, or whatever, group it the way you do. This was a subtle improvement, but was obvious when taken in and out of the signal path. Given that we know that the initial mastering of Aja both reflected the band’s artistic intent and made Aja an audiophile landmark, it’s worth investigating how the digital masterings compare to the original vinyl Aja. So, with Becker on bass and guitar, Fagen on keyboards and vocals, Denny Dias and Jeff Baxter on guitar, and Jim Hodder on drums, Steely Dan — a name borrowed from a dildo in William Burroughs Naked Lunch — was born.Â. “The situation just sort of evolved into having a band and making records with them…,” Fagen explained. We rarely know the sound of the master tape or the intent of the artist, and it’s sometimes the case that what listeners heard when an album was first released was compromised in one way or another, either due to technical limitations or errors. Josh is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on modern U.S. politics and the history of popular music. If only they quoted the item's manufacturer version it would make it easier to tell. Recording alongside nearly 40 musicians, band leaders Donald Fagen and Walter Becker pushed Steely Dan further into experimenting with different combinations of session players while pursuing longer, more sophisticated compositions for the album.  of De-Noise was applied. crest factor DR score or R128 dynamic range. We started at one studio and moved to Village Recorder. While there are limits to what Har-Bal’s filters can do (the Hoffman master still had more low bass), it was relatively difficult to tell the resulting files apart when comparing them side-by-side in Audacity, and I doubt anyone could detect differences in clarity between the two a blind test. During the time of re-master, Roger, Walter and Donald were in Hawaii working on the final mixes/recoding of Kamakeriad, and approval was done by sending CDR’s to them via Fed Ex for approval. Essay by: Brian Sweet (guest post)* Original album Original label Becker and Fagen . “The protagonist is not a musician,” Becker explained. Although the project was actually recorded in Los Angeles with various musicians, this particular reunion was filmed and recorded in New York City at River Sound uptown in the neighborhood of Spanish Harlem. The story actually starts at the original transfer of the analog masters to CD. So, Hoffman’s mastering “fill[ed] in the midrange hole” by boosting the mids a bit, but was otherwise a flat transfer of the analog master.Â, MCA pressed around 5,000 CDs with Hoffman’s mastering, but as many as 4,000 of them were destroyed when the band decided they wanted Nichols to have control of their CD releases. On the older albums, a light processing of De-Noise was applied. 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