I received bags of e-mail with questions about whether or not I was working on the new Steely Dan album. The problem is, I can’t discuss it. Donald and Walter made me sign a non-disclosure agreement. They won’t let me tell anyone what goes on behind closed doors, or even admit that the project exists. This is serious stuff! If you don’t believe me, I can prove it. Here is a copy of said agreement.

I, Roger Nichols, being of sound mind and body, do hereby agree to the following terms and conditions of my employment as engineer-in-chief of the new Steely Dan album, “Two Against Nature”:
1. I shall neither compose, nor shall I publish, any contemporaneous accounts pertaining to the events taking place during the making of said Steely Dan record, during the lifetimes of the principal artists Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, or until such time as all three of us are dead and gone.
2. For the duration of the recording project I shall refrain from using the following terms of art in any of my regularly published columns in “EQ” or anywhere else:
a) “increments”
b) “milliseconds”
c) “SlowTools”
d) “punch at the section”
e) “SampleSlut”
f ) “furlongs per fortnight”
g) “why a duck? Why not a chicken?”
h )”adrenal cotex”
i ) “ I won’t take it home, I’ll just eat it here”
J) “none of my tricks?”
K) “cantilevered clit-shelf”

3. In deference to the fragile mental health of myself and my employers, I will refrain from referencing, in whole or in part, the following anecdotes: “2nd Arrangement”, “your everlasting summer”, “punch at the section”, “track 25”, “Malibu Sheriff”, “mother/daughter undercover agents”, “the girl with four nipples” and “what do mullet look like?”
4. I will refrain from leaving pamphlets and spec sheets for expensive audio and computer gear on the producer’s desk or anyplace else where it will likely be seen by Walter and/or Donald.
5. I shall tithe a small portion of my salary from the project to my family for food and household expenses, rather than spending all of it on expensive audio and computer equipment, as is customary.
6. I will not charge more than $2,000/month in 900 number toll calls to the telephone at the studio or in my hotel room.
7. I will not order food from any restaurant whose name ends in the word “junior” or whose name contains the word “fat”. Examples: “Fatburger” “Bob’s Big Boy Jr.”, “Carl’s Jr.”
8. I will curtail my efforts towards spontaneous human combustion for the duration of the project.
9. Puns - I will do the best I can. I promise.

I, the undersigned, do hereby agree to the above terms for the duration of my employment as engineer-in-chief on the new Steely Dan album and until five years after the release of said album.

Roger Scott Nichols


So, I guess I must talk about something else.

Common References

Everyone has at one time or another had sync problems with tape machines, MIDI gear, or hard disk recorders. ADATs use absolute time for syncing machines, Sony uses DASH lock, MIDI uses MTC, and video guys use SMPTE. All of these time references are fine, as long as you stay in one domain. You can make digital clones and synchronize them with the original tapes and everything is perfect, as long as you don’t change horses in the middle of the stream. (That wasn’t on the list, was it?) Things recently got sticky for me when I needed to sync Pro Tools to Sony 3348 digital tapes on a project that I can’t talk about.

When you format a new 48 track digital tape, you have to set the start times for the SMPTE and CTL tracks (control track, or absolute time). The SMPTE and CTL times do not have to be the same. This allows you to have SMPTE that is referenced to a video project, and maintain a completely separate CTL reference. If you want the CTL and SMPTE code to be the same, there is a procedure to follow that sets both counters to the same number. In my case, it was 00:00:00:00 at the tart of the newly formatted tapes. I have been formatting DASH tapes this way since 1984. I have edited DASH synchronized tapes with no problems, and I have locked up DAT machines and hard disk recorders to the SMPTE track with perfect results. The reason there was no problem was because I was always referencing to the same piece of tape.

This time, however, I had some audio material that was on a slave tape that needed to be transferred to the master tape. Both of the tapes were formatted so that the SMPTE and CTL tracks started at 00:00:00:00. The audio was in the same place on both tapes. They were actually DASH locked together with the CTL track reference when the recording took place. The audio on the master and the slave started at one minute. I locked up Pro Tools to the SMPTE track on the slave tape and dumped the audio into Pro Tools. I then put up the master tape and locked up the Pro Tools to the same time. Theoretically, the audio should have sync’d up and transferred correctly to the master tape, NOT!

It turns out that the SMPTE is not exactly aligned with the CTL track. Usually I always have a common audio track that was cloned from the master to the slave that I can later use to make sure that everything lines up correctly. This time all of the tracks were needed for recording new material, and since I have never had any problems locking masters with their slaves, it seemed safe to erase the common reference track. Murphy’s law strikes again.

The Moral

What it all boils down to, is that if there is a possibility that you will have to use an alternate time reference to synchronize your masters, then make sure that you have a copy of one master track on the slave tape. The best choice would be a click, or snare drum, or other percussive track, but in a pinch, anything will do. When you transfer the slave tracks back to the master, transfer the reference track also. You can then load the original and copy of the reference tracks into Pro Tools and look at them to see if they are lined up. If they are off, you can see exactly how much to offset the slave tape and make the transfer again. When you make the corrected transfer, load the tracks into Pro Tools again to make sure that you made the offset in the right direction. If the tracks line up, then you are done.

The End

I no doubt will have more horror stories to tell you about in the future, but I am now sworn to secrecy. Maybe I can code the information into a normal column so nobody but you can read it. How about poking holes in the eyes of the guy on the park bench on the Royal Scam CD cover and overlay it on my column? But of course you can tell no one.