For someone who works at a pace that rivals Stephen King, Dan the Automator strikes me as a rather relaxed guy. Not stoned-downtempo relaxed, but, rather, the I’m-at-peace-in-my-own-skin type of relaxed. Those are the kind of people I usually hate—especially when they talk fast, which, while usually indicating egotism rooted in a person’s deep sense of insecurity, is not the case with Dan the Automator. Dan’s a funny, fast-talking nice guy, as in, impossible to hate. And that I hate, too.

But, really, the toughest thing to hate about Dan the Automator is his music. And there’s plenty of it not to hate. Without reciting his extensive discography, let’s just say that the San Francisco-based Dan Nakamura makes every rack-jobber earn their pay. He brought Kool Keith down to earth so the former Ultra Magnetic MC could locate his inner Dr. Octagon. He crafted the beats that resurrected Del Tha Funky Homosapien’s career (Deltron 3030). He’s the beat scientist behind the animated super-group, Gorillaz—a shrewd comment on the N’Sync-ing of the music business, and a project that forced the Automator to adjust to singers, as opposed to rappers. His Lovage project, while not as high-concept as Gorillaz, did offer some Music To Make Love To Your Old Lady By, in the same post-Hefner vein as his team-up with Prince Paul and their Handsome Boy Modeling School.

And now, what now? Dan the Automator, just to make sure that rack-jobber isn’t napping, comes clean with his first mix CD, Wanna Buy a Monkey? (Sequence). In its diverse grooves, tracks from Tortoise and Bobby Digital rest easily alongside those from Zero 7 and Dilated Peoples. I sat down with Dan, who told me, veryfast, how he organizes his beats, and why turntablism is better left to people other than himself, folks like Kid Koala and Qbert.

DJ Times: You were classically trained as a violinist.

Dan the Automator: I didn’t choose to play the violin, I was told by mom when I was three that I had to. It was kind of a byproduct of alternative schooling. They thought the violin would round me out culturally. But by the time I was in the fourth or fifth grade, I was interested in pop music. It wasn’t like my mom was like, “You’ve got to be into classical music and that’s all.” I never thought I was going to be a violin player in a symphony. I just realized pretty early on, seventh grade, that I really loved music. I didn’t want to play guitar or be in a rock band or anything like that. So I just bought a lot of records, and read everything on the records.

DJ Times: You had no aspiration to play a rock instrument?

Automator: I just didn’t have the aspiration to be a rock star. I just really loved records. And then a record called “Rapper’s Delight” came out, and that was interesting to me, but once again, interesting in the sense that I loved music. And then this record came out when I was in early high school, or junior high school, and it was called “Do You Like Scratching” by Malcolm McLaren and the World Famous Supreme Team, and it tied it all together for me. Because at that time, there wasn’t really advanced DJing, they were more like rubbing the record and stuff, but I could hear the combination of scratching with musical elements, and I was like, “I think this is what I want to do.” It made sense to me and no one was doing it, really. There were club DJs in hip hop, but scratching was relatively undeveloped. The turntable, with the scratching, combined my interest in music, my interest in hip hop, and my interest in sound.

DJ Times: You started with some belt drives?

Automator: Back when there was Numark and Bozak and possibly the UREI mixers. There were not that many mixers—although Radio Shack made mixers. There weren’t all these turntables. There weren’t any record crates. Yeah, I started with some belt drives in 1984, SBLII Technics, and almost immediately realized I needed the 1200 for scratching. It just so happened in SF, turntables became a big part of the scene around where I was. We were all DJing parties, in halls and parties—not so much in clubs. When you play high schools and parties, you have to play a whole bunch of different music—hip hop, soul, dance music, whatever. But I think spinning hip hop, for me and a lot of other people, was more intriguing. For me, that led to fooling around with drum machines. At that point, some of my musical heroes were guys like Arthur Baker and Bambaattaa. Latin Rascals, a lot of people that were doing the New York Latin and dance music and hip hop. The whole programming thing was really interesting, and I thought maybe I could do remixes and program stuff. So I started fooling around with drum machines and tape editing, actually. All those New York dance music guys were chopping tape and making interesting things happen, and in hip hop you had guys like Mantronix.

DJ Times: So you went from DJing to playing around with a drum machine.

Automator: I had a friend who had a drum machine, a Sequential Circuits. It had eight sounds but you could play them backwards. So I bought one. And then I started fooling around with keys. And this is the time when I first realized the whole deal with sampling. At that time, there were Emulators that cost $8,000—way beyond any price range where I could actually get into. So I bought a delay pedal that had a hold thing, so you could hold it and loop it. And then after that I bought a rack-mount Boss—I don’t know the number, but it could actually store that sample and you could trigger it through a MIDI trigger. So then I could plug my drum machine into it and on one pad had a sampled sound on it. And that was as advanced as I could get at the time.

DJ Times: What was your first sampler?

Automator: In 1986, Sequential Circuits came out with the Prophet 2000, and Ensoniq came out with the Mirage, and both these samplers—and Akai came out with the S900—were in the $1,500-$2,500 range, somewhat more attainable than the Emulators. So I got into the Ensoniq Mirage, which had 2.2 seconds of sample time, but you could lower the sample rate and speed samples up, so you could really get a lot of stuff going. So that’s kind of my first sampler, trying to make things, just pulling stuff off records. At the time I was probably pulling stuff off records that was more recognizable, because I was using it more in the context of the DJ. I was trying to flip stuff into existing stuff, because DJs are all about recurrence, bring back stuff that people are familiar with, things that will perk people’s ears up. So you continue from there and start programming.

DJ Times: Once you started making tracks, how did your classical violin experience manifest itself?

Automator: The fundamental difference between classical music and pop music is that classical music is linear and it tells a story. It starts off somewhere, it goes through its peaks and valleys, and it ends someplace. Pop music is more cycular. You start with a verse or a chorus. You go back to a verse, go back to a chorus, it’s A part, B part, maybe to a C part, maybe back to a B part. With classical music, you have movements, like the four seasons, it’s supposed to represent the entire year. So having had both of those things influence me, I tend to want to tell stories more than I might have if I had just listened to pop music. But at the same time, since I operate in a field that uses choruses, I stick somewhat to that format. I think the difference is, in classical music it’s very common to every measure have a couple notes flatted out or sharped out, to change what’s doing for that moment. Whereas in pop music, you pretty much only change it in sections. And so when I write music I tend to change things during a verse, because that’s how my ear is used to hearing stuff. When I started making music, I was working with rappers, and flatting out something in the middle of a verse doesn’t matter to them—they’ll rap to anything. To them, it’s all about the beats. But when I started working with singers, they’re like, “You can’t do that. That note’s wrong!” They’re used to staying in one key for one section. And for me, it was a really troubling time, because I’m, like, feeling it, and people are telling me I’m wrong, and I’m not confident enough to know that there’s a reason to do what I’m doing, so it took me a few years to come to terms with the idea that, the way I do things is a little different, but because classical music has influenced the way I do things…I’m used to little more irregularity and a little more change. And even dissonance, that’s a really cool thing, and in hip hop, dissonance was really accepted in the music—especially with groups like Public Enemy.

DJ Times: Have you adjusted to staying in key for the singers, or have your singers adjusted to you?

Automator: Both. I’ve adjusted by learning what it is we’re talking about. I had to understand this: Yeah, you can flatten or sharpen things within a measure or verse or something, but you can’t always do it on top of itself. You can’t create dissonance in pop music all the time, because sometimes it just creates a bad bed for someone to sing on. So you have to pick your spots. DJ Times: When you’re making music for a rapper, do you give him a certain amount of bars in which he has to say what it is he has to say? Automator: Some rappers would put an 18-minute song into the first verse if they didn’t have a producer. Kool Keith is different. We choose an approximate distance, usually 16-20 bars. He never rhymes the same twice. So ultimately what will happen is he may overlap by a bar or two, or he may fall short by a bar or two. So what I do instead is run a verse piece for a really long time, let him rhyme, and then in programs like ProTools I’ll put the chorus at the end of the rhyme, ’cause he’s never gonna hit the same bar exactly. Part of the beauty of what he does is his pauses are really interesting, the way he doesn’t speak.

DJ Times: And Del Tha Funky Homosapien?

Automator: Del is mechanical. He’ll hit the beat every time, instinctively. We’ve done shows where he’ll be rhyming, like we did a show at House of Blues—it was for Handsome Boy Modeling School—and he had this really long verse in this song, like 24 bars, and it was the first time we had ever done this show. The song was “Magnetizing,” and it was the first time we ever performed it. It was for the Tibetan Freedom Concert and we had thrown it all together. So by bar four, he’s totally changed the words, he’s freestyling, and he’s rhyming and rhyming, and I’m waiting for the chorus to hit and I’m afraid it’s going to fall apart. And he stops right on the 24. I was like, “Damn, Del.”

DJ Times: You’ve said that the Lovage style is one way for you to overcome limitations.

Automator: It’s a combination of stuff. My production style has evolved over the years because of technological limitations, from having short sample times, to the fact that today samples cost a lot of money. Sample time is infinite now. There’s minutes of sampling time. ProTools, for all intents and purposes, is a 64-track sampler, so you can really go to town. But on the other hand, clearance issues won’t permit that to happen. Actually, in general, we’re losing a great art form of music, the whole musique concrète…

DJ Times: For you, when did that conflict arise? Automator: No one ever went after me when I used a collage of samples, but they’ve done it when I’ve used a break sample here and there. The thing is, when you’re starting out, it’s more important to get a great song out there. You don’t make any money on it, you get in a little trouble for it, and it’s great. When you start making records, though, and you have to answer to things and people, you got to change that philosophy. So I’m at the point where I have to not only clear my samples but also limit the amount that I use. So the way I make records now is there’s a whole lot more playing involved, and I like using drum machines to beef up drums. And I like using samples to make drums. I think the sound of the sampled drum is a little more appealing to me.

DJ Times: Tell me how you sample drums.

Automator: I like to sample drums. I love the sound of drums. I like the live-room aspect. A lot of times, you take a drum sound off a record, and it sounds kind of thin. So what I tend to do, in a program like ProTools, you record the drums in, and you see the wave forms show up, and you listen to it, and then after that, I can come back and on the next track below it, paste another sound beneath it. So it’s like where every time when a kick drum hits I can place another kick—one’s an 808 kick, another’s a more solid kick, and then snare. What happens then is that the drum sounds that were thin get beefed up. The secret to that is finding the ones that best work with each other. I’m not trying to make it sound like a big layer of drums, I’m trying to make it sound like a big set of drums. What I do is I try to get my original drum source—whether I play it or sample it—and then layer it to where it seems like it’s hitting a lot harder. And then what you do is you find other drum sounds, off drum machines or whatever, that have the same characteristics of the original drums, but just have a little more solid thing, and then you put them on top of each other, and then what you do after that is you run the whole thing through a really hard limiting compressor, and if you have a really fast attack and fast release time, it just really highlights the meat of the drums. And then you have that running, and you run that parallel with the original set, you get all the snap. The secret to really big drums is running a clean set through and then re-bussing them through another channel super-compressed. That’ll bring out the body of the drums.

DJ Times: How do you assemble bass sounds?

Automator: I tend to favor a jazzy, upright sound or the dark reggae sound. If you have a bass player, which I do, my bass player is really good at getting the low frequency and soft, dead strings. I’m not into that whole Flea, Red Hot Chili Peppers slap bass. I’m more into the loping laid-back, old R&B, reggae. What we do is have the bass player play with dead strings and play really lightly. Or a lot of times I’ll use a bass on a keyboard, like a JP8000. I’ll have them play the whole song on the keyboard and then I’ll go through it and select the best measures and use those—same with guitar. I have a guitar player named Brandon who plays on all my stuff. We don’t mic it too much, we go direct into a pod—there’s a lot of different tones you can get—and he plays it into there. I also have a Fender twin, which is a really nice old pre-amp and speaker thing. By virtue of the way records are made now you become your own engineer, or at least I’ve become my own engineer. So for Brandon, on the Lovage stuff, we did a lot of classical Spanish-type guitar. So we were using a B&K 4008 mic, a Neumann TLM170 in a room, or running direct out to the pod. We record the whole song, find the best sections, chop them and make them into a whole song. So in a sense you’re still dealing with samples, just samples of live players. And it’s much cheaper to hire guys than it is to clear samples. DJ Times: Why do you like to work with turntablists on your projects? Automator: I’ll tell you something. Back when I was DJing in high school, I thought I could be a great DJ. This was during a time when there were no organizations for turntablists—like ’85, ’86. I was DJing a party in Stockton, it’s allgood, and in the middle of the showcase there was going to be a DJ battle, the first I had ever seen. And these two kids get up there. They were high-school freshmen, and they just killed it. I thought, “I better concentrate on producing.” It turns out the kids were Qbert and Mixmaster Mike. Mike was doing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” with tones—things that nobody had seen before. It didn’t stop me from spinning, but for me I saw that’s where it could go.