Clean Sadowsky tone... Walter Becker... the Dan

Big Dan fan here. Walter did some bass work on their earlier stuff as well.

I love how Steely Dan is known for the cripest tightest recordings. Every gig I play the soundguy runs a Steely tune through the system to do some preliminary mixing.

 

Im also a big Steely Dan fan. Fagen and Becker are truly amazing. Becker plays what is needed to be played on their earlier albums. He even wrote some of the basic riffs that were used on Aja and was smart enough to just let Rainey go off on his own too. The Dan is great.

 

Just curious.... how do you know its a Sadowsky?

 

Granted he could have been playing something different, but walter is a Sad endorser.

 

Excellent... I have almost the same bass..color neck ..but mine has the original EMGs from the early 90's..
It looks like his bass has an ash body?


A few years ago they did a cable show.... Becker was playing a Sdaowsky Strat and it just sounded great.. Tom Barney? was playing bass on that show.

 

back in recording school mention was made many times about how dry and tight the production on steely dan records was. a lot of isolation, no mike bleed through. a lot of room damping. very little reverb. the production is always just flawless. of course studio work was there forte, and many takes were done for every part until they were satisfied with the result.

i have loved steely dan since the early 70's when at the age of 5 or so i would sit in the basement with my old man while he'd be doing a valve job on some hells angels bike listening to 'cant buy a thrill' on an endless 8-track loop.

my younger brother is an engineer and he always brings systems up with either steely dan, or sade's greatest hits (sade's stuff is all very cleanly produced as well).

 

I think it was in BP that he talked about tracking this album. It was all on a Mary Kaye blonde Sadowsky through an Avalon pre. Not a U5, I think it was a VT-737.

In the same article he mentioned that if Chuck Rainey still lived in NY that they would still use him because his playing was so bad ass. I think Becker did a nice job on Everything Must Go. Some tasty lines, and pretty hip fills at the end of Green Book.

I think a lot of us would be surprised at how much of the old stuff was Becker on bass

 

They still do this? I lived in Amsterdam in the 80s and there the album used by sound guys for this reason was The Nightfly :-D

 

Is this Roger's brother?

 

You mean ROGER Sadowsky, right?

M

 

Great tone and I love the playing on the record. My favorite bass track is "Things I Miss The Most".

 

"Peg" is THE bass line. I listened to that line over and over, early in my playing, with the bass high in the mix and just soaked it up. The turn around part Rainey does before the chorus just always turned my toes up.

 

Fun to play, too.

 

Here is a nice photo of Walter with one of his 3 Sadowsky basses.

Roger

 

Listen to bass tone on "Snowbound" (Kamakaraid -Donald Fagen). It's Becker and the tone smokes. I'm not that sure he uses a pick, has anyone confirmed that? As far as production, what I like about the Dan albums is they never sound dated. No gated Snares, reverb heavy vocal, orchestra synth hits, or any of the other date signatures so common in pop music. You can put on a CD like Katy Lied and the production values are so consistent, it could have been made last week. GREAT STUFF.

 

In the BP article he stated that me played most of EMG with the side of his thumb for a phat, thumpy old school sound.