Steely Dan Tickets : Their Albums Are Notable For The Characteristically 'dry' Production Sound

Steely Dan is an American rock band; its core members are Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. The band's popularity peaked in the late 1970s, with the release of seven albums blending elements of jazz, rock, funk, R&B, and pop.Rolling Stone has called them "the perfect musical antiheroes for the Seventies."

The band's music is characterized by complex jazz-influenced structures and harmonies played by Becker and Fagen along with a revolving cast of rock and pop studio musicians. Steely Dan's "cerebral, wry and eccentric" lyrics, often filled with sharp sarcasm, touch upon such themes as drugs, love affairs, and crime.

The pair are well-known for their near-obsessive perfectionism in the recording studio,with one notable example being that Becker and Fagen used at least 42 different studio musicians, 11 engineers, and took over a year to record the tracks that resulted in 1980's Gaucho an album that contains only seven songs.

Steely Dan toured from 1972 to 1974, but in 1975 became a purely studio-based act. The late 1970s saw the group release a series of moderately successful singles and albums. They disbanded in 1981, and throughout most of the next decade, Fagen and Becker remained largely inactive in the music world.

During this time, the group steadily built and maintained "a cult following." In 1993, the group resumed playing live concerts; the early 21st century saw Steely Dan release two albums of new material, the first of which earned a Grammy Award for Album of the Year. They have sold more than 30 million albums worldwide and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March 2001.

Special attention was given to the individual sound of each instrument. The recording was done with the utmost fidelity and attention to sonic detail, and mixed so that all the instruments are heard and none are given undue priority. For example, in the song "Parker's Band", two drum kits are used, which gives the song an unexpected drive, without overpowering the sound; it is not even immediately apparent that there are two drum kits on the track.

Their albums are also notable for the characteristically 'warm' and 'dry' production sound, and the sparing use of echo and reverberation effects which were often heavily over-used on other rock recordings of this period. Long known as perfectionists, they often recorded take after take before selecting the player or performance that made the final cut on their albums.Steely Dan are famous for their use of chord sequences and harmonies that explore the area of musical tension between traditional pop sounds and jazz.

In particular, they are known for their use of the add 2 chord, a type of added tone chord, which they nicknamed the mu major. Other common chords used by Steely Dan include slash chords (inversions), for example B/C or E-7/A. This notation shows a chord (shown to the left of the slash) with a note other than the tonic (shown to the right of the slash) as lowest pitched note.
The band embarked on a 33-date tour in the summer of 2006, a tour that followed Donald Fagen's tour in spring of 2006 in support of his first solo album in 13 years, Morph the Cat.

Also featured on the bill was former collaborator Michael McDonald and his band. McDonald also sat in with Steely Dan during their encore, taking lead vocals on a jazzy version of "Do It Again" and filling out the band further on keyboards. The name of the tour is an homage to the fictional "inventor of the blues" presumably created by Becker and Fagen.The website, Fab-Originees, was simply a mirror of SteelyDan.com.The band's Heavy Rollers Tour began May 5, 2007, at the Beale Street Music Festival in Memphis, Tennessee.

The tour included North America, Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, making it both the largest and most exhaustive Steely Dan tour ever. The tour took its name from lyrics in the song "Gaucho" ("We've got heavy rollers, I think you should know") from the album of the same name.In early March 2008, Steely Dan announced on their website that they would be playing the Montreal Jazz Festival in July