Wendel Jr.

"Wendel Jr. is NOT another drum machine. Wendel Jr. is a state of the art, digital, percussion sound replacement device." That is the introduction the Wendel Jr. is given in the manual produced by Wendel Labs Ltd. in 1985. First introduced by Steely Dan on their 844094 album in 1980, the Wendel Jr. soon became a very popular drum sampler/drum machine used by numerous famous artist, groups and producers. The Wendel Jr's drum sounds are 16 bit sounds sampled at 50 kHz, recorded with no equalization on a 3M Digital Mastering System and then digitally transferred through a special interface, into the EPROM's that are in the Wendel Jr. cartridges being used for playback. The sounds recorded in the Wendel Jr. are not chopped off at the end. The natural decay is totally preserved in the memory chips, therefore providing extremely natural sounding sounds. "Think of Wendel Jr's output as a good mic in the right place of a good sounding drum. The phrase 'Realer than real' comes to mind, but I promised that I would not use it in this manual" is how Roger Nichols describes the Wendel Jr. in the manual.