Roger Nichols obituary

Recording engineer who collaborated with Steely Dan for 30 years
Roger Nichols
Roger Nichols won seven Grammy awards. Photograph: Rick Diamond/WireImage

The albums of Steely Dan were renowned for their sophisticated musical content and for their benchmark-setting audio quality. An indispensable contributor to the latter was their recording engineer Roger Nichols, who has died of cancer aged 66. Nichols also worked on recordings by other prestigious artists, including Diana Ross, the Beach Boys, Rickie Lee Jones, Plácido Domingo and John Denver.

Born in Oakland, California, Nichols was the son of a bomber pilot in the US air force, and during his early years the family followed his father's postings around the US. In 1957, they settled in Rancho Cucamonga, California, where Roger attended high school. One of his classmates was the guitarist and budding bandleader Frank Zappa, with whom Nichols made his first recordings with a reel-to-reel tape recorder. "We would do multiple passes of guitars and bounce them together," Nichols recalled.

Nichols's interest in music was from a technical angle, and he displayed an early flair for scientific experimentation when he built a six-inch mirror telescope when he was 13. He studied nuclear physics at Oregon State University and, in 1965, was employed as a nuclear operator working on the development of the San Onofre nuclear plant in California.

As a side project, he and a couple of friends built their own recording studio, Quantum Studios, in a converted garage and began recording high-school bands and developing their own custom audio equipment. The studio business grew rapidly, and included recording tracks for artists including Kenny Rogers and the First Edition and a lucrative line in commercials, often featuring the then unknown Karen Carpenter on vocals and Larry Carlton (a future Steely Dan collaborator) on guitar.

Nichols and his partners began supplying equipment to other studios, and after they had equipped ABC Records' first studio, Nichols was hired to work there. He was introduced to Steely Dan's masterminds Walter Becker and Donald Fagen by their producer Gary Katz, who had brought them to ABC Dunhill (as it had become) initially as in-house songwriters for other artists. Nichols immediately felt a rapport with them, not least because they shared a passion for audio perfection. "The striving for true hi-fi was common ground with Donald and Walter and Gary," said Nichols. "It wasn't a drag for me to do things over and over. In my own way, I'm just as crazy as they are."

Nichols was an integral part of Steely Dan's 1972 debut album, Can't Buy a Thrill, and the band were so keen to have him aboard that they delayed the recording sessions until he returned from his summer vacation. The album reached the top 20 in the US and generated the hit singles Reelin' in the Years and Do It Again. It was the start of one of the most durable careers in rock music, as Steely Dan created progressively more complex music throughout the 70s, on albums such as Countdown to Ecstasy, Pretzel Logic and Aja. Their 1980 album Gaucho featured Nichols's own invention, the Wendel sampling computer, which created percussion sounds for use when real drummers "weren't steady enough".

Nichols's efforts brought him Grammy awards for his engineering work on Aja and Gaucho, and on Steely Dan's song FM (No Static at All), featured on the soundtrack to the film FM (1978). When Steely Dan later reformed to make Two Against Nature (2000), Nichols's contribution brought him three more Grammys. He also worked on their 2003 release Everything Must Go, and on solo albums recorded by Becker and Fagen. "Basically my whole music industry life has been involved with these guys," Nichols reflected. "We pushed the envelope and did whatever it took to get as much of what happened in the studio on to the end product."

Nichols made time for other interests. He began collaborating with Denver in 1980, and won a Grammy for his work on Denver's children's album All Aboard! (1997). He shared Denver's passion for flying and took trips in the cockpit of Denver's Lear Jet. Nichols, a certified scuba instructor, also liked to go diving with his wife, Connie Reeder, and Denver, and they were friendly with the oceanographer Jacques Cousteau.

Nichols invented a rubidium atomic clock to synchronise digital recording equipment, and in 2005 he set up Roger Nichols Digital, to supply sophisticated recording software.

He is survived by Connie, his daughters Cimcie and Ashlee, his sister Melinda and his brother Jeffrey.

Roger Nichols, music engineer and producer, born 22 September 1944; died 9 April 2011

Today's best video

Latest reviews

  • Morrissey

    Morrissey: World Peace Is None of Your Business review

    4 out of 5


Today in pictures