Here’s another post about pulling a BPM seemingly out of thin air. It’s easier than you think — all you have to do is memorize the BPMs of some really famous songs, perhaps from a band like Steely Dan. Here’s my boilerplate explanation of a “Know Your Tempos” article, shamelessly stolen from Todd Bishop:
If you ever see some sheet music that says “♩ = 215” and you don’t have a metronome on you, all you need to do is sing a song that you know was recorded at 215. Voilà! You’ll have a pretty good idea of how fast you’re supposed to play. It won’t be as accurate as using a click, but it’s a good trick to have. If you can get a decent mental collection of these things, you’ll have a good reference for a variety of tempos. Or tempi. Whatever.
Steely Dan is a great candidate for this gimmick: seven well-known studio albums combined with some notoriously high standards for timekeeping.
The way I usually clock these songs is by tapping along with a metronome for about 30 seconds to get an average, jumping around for tempo changes as needed. Naturally, there is a shortcoming, as I won’t capture the timing nuances of the entire recording. I am aware that there exist tools to analyze a song’s BPM. It’s actually not that difficult, and pretty much any DAW can do this, as long as you have audio files to feed it. (Too bad I’m not sure where all my Steely Dan CDs are...)
Alternatively, you could use some helpful websites that just pull from a streaming database. There used to be a really nifty one called “In Search of the Click Track,” which sadly has been offline for some time now. Nevertheless, I decided to check my work with another one I found, and surprisingly, I got pretty close on most of the tunes.*
These things aren’t perfect; sometimes a song will inexplicably be counted in half-time or double-time, requiring you to do the appropriate math for a more accurate BPM. I also noticed that “FM” had two different tempos depending on the exact release:
I guess the extra 17 seconds from the earlier Gold compilation was enough to nudge the average BPM up by one click.†
Any song with dramatic and deliberate tempo changes will probably break whatever algorithm is being used here. But even in the absence of big tempo changes, this website can still go haywire; “Chain Lightning” got clocked at 142, which is very wrong, and I can’t explain where that number comes from (it’s actually at 95).
While the timekeeping is indeed solid through Steely Dan’s classic discography, I was really curious to see if/how things would improve when I got to the infamous Gaucho and “Wendel” the Drum Machine. The drums on Gaucho befuddled me for quite some time — much of the discussion about the album’s production involves engineer Roger Nichols’ bespoke drum machine software, but there’s still a drummer credited on every track.
Well, in a 2021 interview, Elliot Scheiner (another one of Gaucho’s engineers) explains how things were recorded: Wendel was used to program the drum grooves only for “Hey Nineteen” (the impetus for Wendel in the first place), “Glamour Profession,” and “My Rival,” essentially sampling the original drummer and being used as a sequencer. Drum fills for all of the songs were played live, either as part of the original drum track or as an overdub.
Gaucho has never really clicked with me, and the fact that Wendel was used to defang guys like Steve Gadd just makes the whole thing kind of gross. I know it’s very on-brand for a drummer to complain about it, but Gaucho really dove into this somnifacient sludge that many people knock Steely Dan for.
I think Walter and Donald had their misgivings after the fact, as even the most lifeless drum part was an apparent ordeal to program, adding additional strife to an already arduous album. As Gaucho’s 2000 reissue states:
Unfortunately, at this primitive stage of the evolution of the computer and its requisite software, even the most minute event had to be programmed in the gnarly and unforgiving 8085 Assembly Language, in which all relevant parameters needed to be described in its baffling hexagesimal-base numerical system, which ultimately became the only language Roger Nichols spoke or understood, at least for a time.
As it turned out, the simplest imaginable manipulations—we are, after all, simple guys‡—ended up adding perhaps 7 or 14 months, all told, to our already Augean labors, and hundreds of thousands of dollars to our monstrously swollen budget. And so was born the era of sampled drums and sequenced music — “The Birth of the Cruel”, as we now think of it… at the time, it all seemed worth it.
As Donald said in 2006:
This was in the days when digital was still very primitive. Roger’s machine did not even have any switches, it only had a regular computer keyboard and he had to type all these bytes out, huge lists of numbers, which took him 20 minutes, and at the end he would hit Return, and we heard this one snare a beat. It took so long. It got a little better during The Nightfly, but it was so horrible, I have tried to figure out how to get out of sampling ever since.
Anyway, for the usual tempo trivia, the slowest Steely Dan song is “Third World Man” at 54, although it’s so slow that it may have been counted in half-time; if so, the next slowest song would be “Sign In Stranger” at 62. “Bodhisattva” is at 222, narrowly beating out “With A Gun” (218) as the fastest Steely Dan song, although there’s a similar problem: these two are so fast that they may have been counted in double time, putting the goddam “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” as the fastest at 154.
The mode is 122, with four songs. Moreover, there is a conspicuous number of songs (about a dozen) very close to 120; for instance, “Don’t Take Me Alive” sits around 119, while “Doctor Wu” is around 121. Because only 120 is the traditional metronome marking, it again makes me wonder what the tempo is supposed to be. In fact, a number of songs, such as “Do It Again,” “Black Friday,” and “Parker’s Band,” are very close to a proper tempo marking, but don’t quite make it.
So, here’s my list of highlights:
- 63 — “Gaucho”
- 73 — “Dirty Work”
- 76 — “Kings”
- 78 — “Night By Night”
- 80 — “Any Major Dude Will Tell You”
- 85 — “The Royal Scam”
- 88 — “Throw Back The Little Ones”
- 95 — “Black Cow”
- 99 — “The Fez”
- 105 — “Brooklyn (Owes The Charmer Under Me)”
- 110 — “FM”
- 112 — “Green Earrings”
- 116 — “Deacon Blues”
- 120 — “Hey Nineteen”
- 122 — “Babylon Sisters”
- 125 — “Do It Again”
- 131 — “Black Friday”
- 135 — “Reelin’ In The Years”
- 140 — “Your Gold Teeth”
- 143 — “Parker’s Band”
- 154 — “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo”
You can get my big list of all 64 classic Steely Dan songs at the bottom of the article, including “FM.”
With all of Steely Dan’s rhythmic demands, you might be wondering to what extent they used a click track. In this Modern Drummer issue, Jeff Porcaro claims that, while Gaucho was recorded with a click (one of those old UREI 900-series digital metronomes), some of the older albums (like Katy Lied) were not.
The UREI more or less lets you set whatever tempo you want, so there’s no need to pick the closest tempo as you would with an analog metronome. A song like “My Rival” (which was Wendel-fied) got clocked at 97 BPM, and it may well and truly be at 97, even though that’s remarkably close to the more traditional 96 BPM.
(BTW, I know about the other Steely Dan albums that came out after Gaucho, but I have never listened to them. I mean no disrespect, but… c’mon.)
* ^ I might have to double-check the BPMs for all of my older tempo posts now...
† ^ ICYDK, “FM” from the Gold album ends with a sax solo since it’s supposed to be a combination of the two versions from the FM film soundtrack (tracks 1 and 20). The version from A Decade of Steely Dan is simply track 1 off the soundtrack, and ends with a guitar solo instead. As far as I can tell, the rhythm tracks are the same. So there you go.
‡ ^ lol. lmao even.
(Photo Distributed by ABC Records — Worthpoint Worthpoint 2 Worthpoint 3, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=166167029)
