Good idea, Fred. :-)
Peter, no video, but a lot of what I do is really quite obvious - much of it is delay based arpeggios and chords. Here's something that anyone with a handy echo pedal might find fun - I showed Lydia Kavina this and it sounded really great when she did it:
Set your echo pedal to, say, two second repeats, and with feedback set so that you get to about half volume after five repeats. It's not critical.
Now decide on a pretty little four note arpeggio and play one note of it, staccato, every two and a half seconds, each note lasting a half of a second. (i.e. play the first note, play the second note immediately after the first one is repeated for the first time, then play the third note immediately after the second note is repeated for the first time, and the fourth note immediately after the third note is repeated for the first time.) After ten seconds you will have constructed your arpeggio in the delay loop of the echo pedal. At this point you can either keep it going the same way by repeating what you just did, or introduce a variation and let the arpeggio evolve.
As you can imagine there are a great many ways that you can vary this simple scheme. Lengthening the notes and playing them more legato will result in the arpeggio blurring into a drone chord with a varying texture as different notes in the chord become louder and softer.
It also means you are only actually playing for a percentage of the time, so you have some space where you can decide on a variation, find the next pitch on your pitch preview and maybe even devote a little brain power to operating an expression treadle to add some character and interest to the mechanically exact repeats that the echo box provides. Sweeping the treadle at a rate that is a ratio of the speed of the echo repeats (say every four seconds in this instance) works well and doesn't require too much thinking about.
It would be interesting to hear it tried by someone with strong rhythm skills. Personally I am thinking of ways to automate parts of the process to get some complex rhythmic patterns that I couldn't do unaided. (Unaided at the moment. Maybe after hearing a machine do it I'll try to imitate it by hand and learn that way.)
Previously you have described the echo pedal as a kaleidoscope, making pretty much anything sound good, but I find it more useful to think of it as a metronome and a sequencer and a means to pseudo-polyphony.
What you heard on Steely Dan III was variations on that technique (but not "in tune") and with some old fashioned woo-woo playing - you know, that stuff that bands with a theremin and no idea do - thrown in to add a little interest.
