One man's quest to remaster Steely Dan's concert recordings
Dan Belcher has been called "curator of the Steely Dan live museum."
If you’ve encountered a Steely Dan concert bootleg with the remarkable clarity and dynamic balance of an official release, there’s a good chance you have one person to thank. Over the past few years, Dan Belcher has been diligently remastering audio and video recordings of the band’s live shows and publishing them on his YouTube channel, where they’ve racked up millions of views.
“I had somebody tell me once that I’m the curator of the Steely Dan live museum,” the 41-year-old recently said by phone from his home in Louisville. “I’m taking that very seriously. When I put a video out there, I want it to be something that you can sit down and put on a big-screen TV with a great sound system and feel like you’re there.”
For his loyal audience of Danfans starved for new performances, Belcher is also now creating a kind of appointment viewing. Tomorrow, May 11, at 8 p.m. Eastern Time, he will stream a never-before-circulated soundboard recording: Steely Dan’s July 1, 2009, concert at London’s Hammersmith Apollo. The show includes session guitarist Elliott Randall sitting in with the band on “Reelin' in the Years,” done in the rarely performed original arrangement from Can’t Buy a Thrill.
In the following Q&A, Belcher discusses the challenges of the remastering process, the distinct pleasures of the Steely Dan live experience, and the shows he most often revisits.
You’re doing a great service to Dankind in posting these remastered concerts. How did you decide to start tinkering with Steely Dan’s live recordings?
I first started going to Steely Dan concerts in 2003, and I’d been listening to these live bootlegs for years and years, always thinking to myself, Man, they sound good, but I could make it sound so much better. There are some amazing performances of these songs, but too often before I work on them the recordings are of absolutely terrible quality—really sharp, piercing highs, almost no bass, no compression.
One day in 2021, I sat down and said, “I’m going to try this and see what happens.” I had a copy of iZotope RX, which has a music rebalance tool in it, and it allows you to take a song and split it up into drums, bass, vocals, and other sounds, and change how loud each of those things are. What I did that first time wasn’t great, but it was better than nothing. I also discovered I get a lot of satisfaction out of taking things and fine-tuning them, getting them to sound big and lush and rich.
I knew absolutely nothing about video editing at that point, but I decided to try to make the Steely Dan live videos brighter and clearer, too. Usually they’re quite dark and muddy. Around that time was when the Topaz Video AI software had been released, and it allowed me to begin upscaling videos and enhancing them to higher frame rates and making the videos look reasonably decent.
I started thinking, These are looking better and sounding better. I should share them with people. I had no expectations that the videos would actually get much interest, but a decent number of people watched those early ones. I began to believe I should stick with it and improve all of the concerts that we have video for.
How do you typically source the live recordings?
The vast majority of them are things that I was able to get from the Trader’s Den, which is a really good source for lossless audio files. That generally means you can expect to have higher-quality stuff, but not always. It comes down to the quality of the source recording. If it’s lossless, you’re not getting any digital artifacts, which is great, but if it’s recorded on the absolute cheapest RadioShack cassette recorder ever, it’s going to sound terrible anyway. For one of the shows, I had to go actually buy a bootleg CD off of eBay, which I absolutely hate doing.
Steely Dan don’t have the same level of bootleg culture around them as the Dead or Dylan, where at any one show there likely were multiple fans taping. Does that make it harder for you to find decent-quality recordings?
There is a fairly small number of Steely Dan soundboard recordings relative to other bands. But we do have a good number of audience recordings. The key here is that the number of those goes downhill over time. The early reunion tours in the 1990s, when Steely Dan were coming back and everybody was super excited—there is a recording of nearly every one of those shows. As we got into the 2000s, there were still a bunch of recordings. But once we got into the era of the iPhone, that is when you started to see the number of audience recordings really dwindle. There are still some out there from the most recent tours, but not nearly as many as there used to be. And what you find now in many cases is somebody who filmed it with their phone, and so you don’t have the highest-quality audio, but it’s better than nothing.
You would you rather work off a concert that was taped on cassette in the ’90s as opposed to a show that was recorded on a phone?
It’s less the medium that’s the issue and more so what kind of microphone was used and where it was placed. I have heard quite a few cassette-era recordings that are pretty clean and balanced for being an audience recording. Of course, you’re always going to have a little tape hiss, but in those cases there’s not much else going on. On the other hand, a lot of them sound dreadful because the person had the cheapest microphone they could pick up from RadioShack and they have it hidden underneath a ball cap, so it’s extra muffled. With the more recent digital recordings, sometimes people have managed to sneak in some really nice equipment and have picked up some really high-fidelity audio. Then other people have just recorded with their phones, and those never sound great, but in a lot of cases they don’t sound bad either.
Recordings of Steely Dan concerts from the 1970s are relatively rare, I’ve gathered.
They are. We don’t have anything that I’m aware of from ’72 or ’73, other than when they were on television. The live concert recordings we have from them are limited to ’74, and some of them sound really nice, including the one from the Record Plant. Off the top of my head, there are one or two others that I want to get around to remastering soon because they’re rough but could be made to sound really good. There are so many songs that we know got played live that we don’t have particularly good recordings of—or any recordings of. It’s frustrating that among the thousands of people who attended some of these concerts, nobody bothered to give us a good recording.
Steely Dan often play essentially the same set on each tour. They don’t often vary the arrangement of songs drastically from date to date in the way that, say, Dylan does. What is the draw for you in listening to multiple Steely Dan shows from the same tour?
It’s true that they don’t have a big variance in set list inside a tour. But there’s so much room for the solos to be different every night, and I also appreciate the little fills that the different musicians are playing from night to night. They approach it differently just based on how they’re feeling it during that show. That jazz approach makes every performance feel pretty different.
My favorite of the keyboard players that Steely Dan toured with was Ted Baker. When I go back and listen to the 2000 and especially 2003 performances with him, he sounds so different in every performance. With the little things that he does here and there and the way that he voices chords, sometimes he’ll completely change the feel of a part of the song compared to the next day when he does it a different way. That makes it so much fun to hear the variety. There’s so much expressiveness, because it’s all stuff that’s not scripted. He plays just what he feels.
When I talked to legendary mastering engineer Bernie Grundman, he described a process of listening to a recording on different systems in an attempt to make sure it sounds good in any environment. If you listen to a recording on great speakers, of course it’s going to sound great. But a smart engineer will test for all the different ways that people listen.
Getting the sound to translate to different devices is something I’ve really focused on during the last couple of years. Before I was just making it sound good on my speakers. Now I want it to sound just as good if you are listening to it on your phone with some earbuds. So I’ll take a recording, after I get done doing a round of editing, and listen to it in the car to make sure that it’s sounding OK. Sometimes I’ll be listening in the car and say, “Jesus Christ, this kick drum is punching me in the chest! I’ve got to change that.” I’ll even mow the lawn and listen to it on some earbuds, because if it sounds good in that environment, I’m doing something right. This is the mastering engineer’s number one job.
The Steely Dan restorationists who are attempting to clean up rough mixes of songs from Gaucho also use software tools to break audio files of studio recordings into stems. When you’re doing that with a concert recording, is it a challenge to deconstruct the song and still maintain the feeling of a live recording?
I worried about that initially when I started. I didn’t want to process a recording too much and make it sound like a studio recording—up in your face, with no sense of distance or depth. But the more recordings I worked on, I realized that ends up not usually being too big of an issue. The drums are what I found to be the single biggest determining factor in how a song sounds live versus in a studio. If you take a studio recording and a live recording of something, remove all the drums, and keep all of the other sounds, there is not as big a difference as you would expect. Some of the drum kits are bone dry, no reverb. Some of them have tons of natural room reverb. I can’t go in and drastically change that. So I just commit to, “Here’s what it’s going to be, and I’m going to make it the best version of that that is possible.”
To keep my remasters from going off in the wrong direction, I like to use reference tracks. I’ll pull in, for example, something from Northeast Corridor as a reminder of what a professionally mixed and mastered Steely Dan live recording sounds like. At the moment I’m using “Glamour Profession” from that album as my test bed.
When you’re remastering a concert, you’re listening to each instrument at a granular level. I’m sure that has been an interesting way to, in a sense, look under the hood of some of these performances.
It’s fun and exciting to listen to the shows with a really critical ear. But there have been times when I’ve listened to the same concert 73 times. It can become tedious. That is one reason why I’m not posting new shows in a really regimented schedule. The sheer number of times I’m listening to these things while I’m working on them leads to burnout if I push myself too hard. Part of the burnout is not just that I get mentally tired from working on something, but there is the burnout that mixing and mastering engineers have when they are listening to something they’re working on for 45 minutes or an hour straight. Your ears actually change. What at first sounded to you really nice and balanced, crisp and clear, starts to sound different after you listen to it for 45 minutes. You might start to find it lacking a bit of top end, so you add a top-shelf EQ. Then you come back to that song the next day and you’re like, “Hell, man, this sounds terrible! Way too aggressive and sharp.” It’s because your ears get tired. When I’m working, I have to take a break, reset my ears, and come back to it later. If you are listening to stuff cranked up really loud, everything sounds good. The way your ears work, you pick up certain frequencies better than others. But if you turn your speakers down to a fairly low volume, all of a sudden you realize a balance of the song is off. I am hearing the vocals, but not much else. I’m kind of losing the drums. You have to make your adjustments, then crank the volume back up and see if it still sounds good.
It makes me think of what Dean Parks told me was the scariest part about recording with Steely Dan—the playback. He said playback in the studio was totally dry. Becker and Fagen wouldn’t add any effects to make a player’s take sound better during playback. They just wanted to hear exactly what his performance was, for better or worse. You seem to be reflecting that ethic with your remastering process. You only want to hear exactly what’s on the tape, as clear as it can possibly be.
What I’m doing is a combination of something between a mixing engineer and a mastering engineer. I’m not just working from the final two-channel stereo and doing a little adjustment here and there. I’m also going back into the stems. Although it’s more limited than if I had a true multitrack file to work from, I’m still getting into the weeds and making mixing choices. That does put me in an odd situation, where I’m having to wear two caps. I want to honor the intent that Donald and Walter had and what they wanted it to sound like. But at the same time, I don’t know exactly what they wanted it to sound like, right? It may be a recording from the soundboard, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that is how it sounded through their sound system that night. So I’m having to make creative choices, and that’s kind of a tricky thing to do, because it’s tempting to go all out and process the snot out of something and make it sound as good as humanly possible. But I have to remind myself, Back it down a little. Don’t go too hard.
With some of these concerts that are two-plus hours long, how many total hours on average do you log doing the remastering work?
Again, it depends on the quality of the source audio or video. If it’s a soundboard recording, that typically means way less work. If I’m remastering an audience recording, there are usually going to be differences in sound quality throughout the show as the person moves around and the microphone gets shifted and so forth. So I’ll have to balance certain chunks of a song to sound the same as the other parts. That stuff can take an eternity depending on the recording. One recording of the very first reunion concert in 1993 was like that. The sound changed three or four times in a song, and I had to do my best to try to make it even. But with a nice clean soundboard recording, it’s way easier.
For this London show from July 2009 that I’m premiering with a live stream, I was able to do 80 percent of the work in about a day. But the other 20 percent took me three weeks. I want to make this stuff sound the best I can because I am trying to preserve this for everybody to be able to enjoy for a long time. I don’t want to be sitting down and listening to something in five years and be like, “Agh, I really wish I had made that snare pop a little more!” I’ll get a nice balance usually within a day or two that I’m pretty happy with. From there, I’ll tweak the amount of compression on the bass and listen to it. Then I’ll come back to it later that day and tweak it again. The next day I’ll come back and make a change to something else. The day after that I’ll realize, Well, now that I changed the drums, that bass guitar sounds a little off. That’s why it ends up taking a while, because I’m just doing little bits here and there with a dynamic EQ after the initial balancing work is done. For example, I’ll focus on just getting the bass guitar to not have weird notes that pop out. That is the kind of thing that takes a really nuanced approach and a critical ear and really listening as you’re working through it. My perfectionism makes it take as long as it usually does. But again, I feel like it’s saving me work in the long run, because if I do it right, I’m not going to be compelled to go back and do it again later on.
Donald and Walter’s perfectionism has a way of rubbing off, eh?
Part of it is that, yes. I know how seriously they took this stuff. Donald and Walter were both famously anti-bootleg people, and part of that is because they did not want to present anything less than the best version of their music. So I am trying to at least make sure that if these concert recordings are out there, people are able to hear them in a way that somebody can actually say, “This is the best representation of what you could do with this material.” Of course, I’ll never have a chance to see what Walter would’ve thought about these remasters, and there’s no way that Donald is thinking or caring about this stuff. But I have heard from other people who are connected to the band, and all of them have been like, “This is wonderful. I am so grateful that you are doing this. It sounds amazing.” Family members of the late Ted Baker told me they were super grateful of the work that I had done and they shared the recordings with the rest of the family.
What are some of your favorite Steely Dan shows to revisit?
One that I redid very recently from 2008 in Cincinnati is my easy answer. I actually attended that show. I’ve seen Steely Dan live a bunch of times and don’t necessarily remember a lot about some of those shows. They kind of blur together a little bit. But I actually still remember that Cincinnati show because it was such a good one. The set list was really out there. They brought back the idea of having the instrumental overture. They did a funk version of “Showbiz Kids.” They played “Two Against Nature” and “New Frontier.” Walter sang “Gaucho”—and I love Walter’s voice. I’m in the minority, on that, I think. Also, the musicianship that night was really on point. I remember sitting there getting goosebumps watching one of the drum solos on “Aja,” and when it ended I could hear a woman behind me say to herself, “Goddamn.”
Other shows I’ve remastered that I keep finding myself going back to are the 2000 and 2003 shows from Detroit. Both are outstanding examples of the band after they’d been back on the road and really found their footing. For something a little different, I also highly recommend the 2009 Boston show where they played Aja and The Royal Scam back to back, plus the 2009 Royal Scam Night concert in Chicago with Larry Carlton sitting in with the band for the entire show.
I also really enjoyed Donald’s 2006 solo tour. I saw him in Chicago on that tour. But the one that he did in Toronto in March of that year is really, really good. He even does some Rhodes soloing. That whole show is great. I come back to that one a lot. That’s one that I really recommend for something kind of different because it is, again, a Donald solo show, so that already makes it a bit unique.
Is there a holy grail Steely Dan live recording that you’ve heard about but haven’t been able to get your hands on?
The Rarities Night concert at the Beacon in 2011. We have a mishmash of different audience recordings of that. None of them great, for the most part, but at least we have something, because that was such an incredibly unique show. I hope a full recording is out there and surfaces one day. The person that was able to get me the July 2009 soundboard from London said that he thinks that there is a soundboard of the Rarities Night show, and it’s just a matter of tracking it down. I don’t know if it’ll ever see the light of day, but I’ve got my fingers crossed.
How has your remastering process evolved over the years?
As I have gotten more practice, I’ve refined my techniques and been able to find different approaches that I hadn’t considered before, and I’ve learned little tricks here and there. The tools have also gotten better over time. Instead of iZotope for splitting audio into stems, for instance, I now use RipX, and it does a much better job at making those stems sound good. When you extract out the bass, it actually sounds like a bass guitar instead of missing some of the attack and decay. I’ve been able to go back and redo some of my older recordings now, because I can make things sound so much better than I could initially. It’s a night-and-day difference when you listen to my earliest stuff compared to what I’ve been doing lately.
For me, it’s worth the effort to get the best quality that I can out there, because nobody else is going to be taking the time to do this. It makes me so happy when people tell me, “I’m so glad I can hear this music the way it is meant to be heard.” That means a lot. That’s why I do this.
Wow! I cannot believe I did not know Dan's incredible work until now! Thank you Dan and thank you Jake! And "Dankind"??? That was a LOL! Where did you get that from Jake? I love it!
Amazing. Been a fan of Dan's stuff for a while now, so great!