What do a timetraveling doctor, a rebel MC from the year 3030, a fictional school for male models and gorillas all have in common? One producer, Dan the Automator, the man behind some of hip-hop's most imaginative worlds. This is the story of how each of those records took on their own sonic identity and how he went from a cramped room in his parents house to shaping one of the biggest bands of the 2000s. Let's rewind all the way back to the beginning. Daniel Nakamura, better known as Dan the Automator, was born in San Francisco Sunset District in 1966 to Japanese American parents. And his early years were filled with classical training, not hip-hop. I first got into music against my will. I was 3 years old and my mom and dad started me on violin lessons and I did that for a number of years, about 13 years I guess. It wasn't until later when he started discovering music for himself that the spark really took hold. I discovered pop and soul music and that's when my real personal interest and personal discovery of music started to happen. And by high school, Dan was obsessed with vinyl, buying everything he can afford, studying every credit, every sound, which eventually led him to start DJing. In high school, I started discovering the whole thing of DJs and turntables. For me, it was a record called Do You Like Scratching? Malcolm McLaren and the world famous Supreme Team. Do you like scratching? Scratching. Yeah. What is it? Scratching. I was like, "All right, I see what they're doing. This is turntables being scratched." And part of the reason was that the world famous Supreme Team wasn't really super good at doing it. So, it was easier to figure out what they were doing. For a while, he thought DJing might be his calling until one night in Stockton changed his mind. I got this DJ show where like four DJs were playing this party in Stockton and in the middle they had this little battle exhibition. These two little came out there and they're just kind of battling each other. One guy just cutting incredibly fast and like the other one's like making songs out, tones up stuff. I'm just looking at this going like these kids are amazing. If this what the local kids do, this isn't going to work out too well. And only later they find out that one was mix and one was Cubert. Dan shifted his focus from the turntables to making his own music. His first credits came on King Tech and MC Sway's Flyamic Force EP before stepping out on his own with music to be murdered by in 1989. An instrumental EP blending sampled heavy beats, DJ cuts, and scratch routines wrapped in a dark tongue-in-cheek concept inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 spoken word album. Originally recorded at home, Dan took it into a studio to polish it, but made a discovery that would shape his future recording process. I had already made it at home on like a four track or eight track cassette thing, and I was just going there to re-record it. The crazy thing was the demos actually sound better than that record. That was when I was like, I'm never going to work in the studio again. I'm going to get equipment to work at home. Followup EP, King of Beats, dropped in 1990. It took a genius mind to produce this. He creates and automates law for cool sticks. So drop your drumsticks. But it was a chance encounter that would define his next chapter. Cory New House, he was a intern for MCA. He used to stay with me at my parents house. One night he goes, "There's these guys in Davis I pass out records to. Is it okay if they come by here?" It turned out to be Josh, Shadow, X, Tom, the whole Soulides crew. Basically, they came in my house. They saw the records on the drum machines. And Josh knew who I was and he's like, "You think you can help us? were trying to make music. The basement became a hub for Bay Area talent with a rising beat maker named DJ Shadow spending long hours there. In Elliot Welder's book, DJ Shadow introducing, Shadow painted a vivid picture of what it was like to work in Dan's tiny studio. Autolimator didn't have the reputation he does now. His studio was a really small blue room at his parents house. You had to climb a ladder into tiny little box he'd created. It felt like you were closed off from the world, everything within arms reach. Shadow used the space to craft his debut album, Introducing with Dan's steady hand and technical input, eventually earning him an engineering credit on the album. And while Shadow was spending long hours crafting what would become his debut album, Another Chance Me was about to change Dan's path. With an MC whose imagination was as wild as his lyrics. By the mid 1990s, Cole Keef had already built his reputation. An MC with surreal lyrics and unpredictable personas. After Ultramagnetic MC's dissolved, he began experimenting in California with producer Cutmaster Kurt, recording two strange atmospheric tracks, Dr. Octagon and Technical Difficulties. As Dr. Octagon College girls open legs for beer cakes, French toast and herbs were covered with giant eggs. It was around this time that Keith and Dan crossed paths. There used to be a zen out of San Francisco called The Bomb Hip Hop. I'm pretty sure that they brought Ultra out one time for some show and I met Keith. Then Ultra was at the tail end of their music making thing and Keith was looking for something to do. We end up going to New York and I was doing a bunch of demos with him. Those early connections would soon lead to Dr. Octagonologist, a sci-fi hip-hop concept album that sounded like nothing else in 1996. And Dan's mindset at the time made sure of that. I was talking to my friend before I made this record and he's like, "You know, you're really good at making beats. Why don't you make stuff that people are doing? You can get some jobs. I was like, "No, I'm going to do what I want to do." And two things are going to happen. Either no one's ever going to care or I made my own lane. Call Keep's new persona on the project was straight out of a comic book. A timetraveling extraterrestrial gynecologist from Jupiter with X-ray sunglasses shifting skin colors and a penchon for gruesome absurd medical tales. At the time, most producers were looping the same break beats. James Brown samples, funk staples, and chasing a familiar sound. Dan wanted to break that cycle. The Octagon record, I was like, I don't care. There's no such thing as a rule. If you look at that record, one of the main things I tried to do was pull from every kind of genre. So, my idea with that was like anything goes in terms of like we can make anything work. That meant pulling from a much wider palette. Classical melodies, horror movie scores, tripop atmospheres, rock breaks. The beats were slower, heavier, and psychedelic. bridging east coast boom bat with moody trip hop elements. It was also the first time that Dan started experimenting with synthesizers. I had also gone away from all samples and I had gone to analog synthesis which was also that time not really a rap thing. I was hanging out in New York a lot and there's a music store called Rogue Music and they sell used stuff. I remember I bought my first analog synthesizer with a memory mug plus that's all the sounds from like Earth people like No Awareness All stuff that's just strictly drums and a memory mug. Pull out the scar, remove the cancer, breaking his back, chisel necks for the answer. To complete the vision, they brought in DJ Cuber. A turntable is so skilled that many consider him the greatest of all time. Dan the Automator was one of the Bay Area DJs and he was like, "Okay, so this Cuber guy, he lives in Fris, too. So, I'm going to have him on the Dr. Octagon album cuz I had just won the DMC USA Championships." And that's how it all started. Hubert's scratches became integral to the record's storytelling on tracks like Bear Witness in particular, introducing a wider audience to the turntableist scene. The sessions took place at the now infamous glue factory and Keith worked really fast writing in a stream of consciousness style which left hardly any time for editing. When I buy a pack of pads, 10 papers come in. I say this stuff is octagon stuff. This stuff over here is going to be sex stuff. It's like I'm cooking. I'm putting those ingredients only I'm writing in that mold for a week of that album. Writing in a stream of consciousness style which left hardly any time for editing. When Dr. Octagonologist dropped in 1996, it didn't really fit into any scene. At first, its audience leaned into heavy rock fans and skateboarders. But over time, it built a deep following among hip-hop heads. When we made the rock stars loved, the rave kids loved it, the rappers loved it. Nobody can do that. Nobody made an album that to everybody like that. For Dan, the album proved that you can push hip-hop's boundaries without losing its soul. And for Prince Paul listening in, it marked down as a kindred spirit in conceptual worldbuilding rap. By 1999, the respect between Prince Paul and Dan the Automator had turned into a collaboration. Paul had just come off a Prince Among Thieves, a fulllength hip-hop opera featuring the likes of Chris Rock, Big Daddy Kane, and Everlast. And the way their next idea came together was as crazy as the concept itself. That was a joke. We were talking about Chris Elliot and Get a Life. Remember the episode, Handsome Boy Modeling School? I'm like a rough diamond that just needs a little polishing. And that's exactly what Handsome Boy Modeling School is going to do for me. And then all of a sudden, he's at Tommy Boy and he's like, I told Tom and Monica that we got a group called Handsome Boy Model School and they want to sign us. I was like, all right, bet. Let's do it. It started as a throwaway joke, but the label loved the name and signed the idea on the spot. There was no music yet, just a concept. A fictional group with a revolving cast of guests from across genres. Suddenly, the producers had to turn the joke into a full-blown album. They committed fully. Paul becoming the smoothtalking chess Rockwell and Dan taking on the martini sipping Nathaniel Merryweather. The backstory, they were instructors at fictional school for male models. What we've done, we've compiled our life experiences as international playboys and handsome men into one terrific course. In Dan's living room, they set up two MPC 2000 side by side, swapping floppies and running every idea for a private filter. Is it handsome? We were going out to the video stores and find the stupidest videos we could find. So we had the NPCs together, stupid videos in the background and we would go through different samples and different records. We play it and go, "Does that sound handsome?" That was the gauge and you knew if it was handsome or not. So we was compiling different sounds and different samples into a handsome pile. It was like a conversation ideas bouncing back and forth between the samplers. It would go in a few different ways. One way would be somebody will make a skeleton. Here goes a drum beat. here goes whatever the main loop or main sound or whatever is being played at the time. It's almost like sliding the NPC over like, "Oh, I got something for that." Everything inspires something else. It's like communication, like conversation. You tell me one thing, I add on to whatever the conversation is. And so, it's back and forth from the opening track. Rock and roll could never hit like this. They made their intentions clear. Ladies and gentlemen, check it out. A chaotic collage of 10 samples from Philip Glass and Stza Sonic to blues rock and disco stitched into one seamless track. Magnetizing brought in Dell the funky homo sapiion. Spitting over a moody Nick Ingman sample and foreshadowing one of Dan's future projects. We just write down a list of people cuz I remember at that point Dan was a big Dell fan. So I was like I know Dell. Let me introduce you to him. And that's probably the first person we recorded. There were moments of pure beauty too. The truth let Rashene Murphy's smoky vocal float over a pensive jazz loop. And on Holy Calamity, DJ Shadow and DJ Quest turned Kashmir stage band and Dr. Oxans bear witness into a turntableish showcase. One of the records purest nods to hip-hop tradition. So, How's Your Girl blurred the line between a mixtape concept album and satire. Critics praised its inventiveness and fans embraced it as a cult classic. When we did shows, me and Dan come out in a suit really doing much of nothing except talking gibberish. But look in the audience and then girls with blazers and mustache, guys with blazers. And that to me affected me more, I think, than anything. I was, "Oh my god, people are really fans of this." And it was Dell's standout moment here that would lead directly to Dan's next project. After the absurdest fun of Hansen Boy Modeling School, Dan set his sights on something even crazier, a full-blown hip-hop space opera. Dell came in with the idea for the character, a futuristic rebel MC in the year 3030. And Dan began fleshing out the universe around him. I mean, he's one of the greatest MC's there is, period. Dell came with the character and like the idea of the character. I kind of worked on forming the world a little bit more. He had the character's DNA, I guess, is what I would call it. And then I kind of like took that and took some liberty and push it along to where we have a full world plan. In their imagined future, mega corporations and authoritarian governments control a dystopian galaxy. Dell becomes Deltron Zero, a meek soldier turned intergalactic battle rapper leading a rebellion with nothing but his rhymes, hacking skills, and defiance. The album even looked like the future, or at least how the past imagined it. Its cover was a shot of a Parisphere from the 1939 New York World Fair, a symbol designed to showcase futuristic visions of the world. Inside, Dan built the same retrofuturistic feel in sound, lush orchestral swells, psychedelic Prague rock riffs, eerie synths and boom bap drums, all lifted from late ' 60s and '7s soundtracks, library records, and obscure rock LPs. The third piece of the Deltron puzzle was Canadian turntableist Kid Koala, a DMC champion known for his playful storytelling style on the decks. Dan saw him not as a DJ, but as a sound designer who could help bring the album's world to life. When it comes time to do stuff on Deltron, my duty make sure that that part of it turntables are represented, but to find a way to twist it to harmonize with what's going on both musically and narrative. That turntable work wasn't just for show. On tracks like Positive Contact, Kid Koala sliced up snippets of sci-fi dialogue into rhythmic patterns almost like another percussion layer. Positive contact. Positive contact. Mastermind rides on a loop from 1970s Puerto Rican singer Johnny Alivo's Alguistic Loop with a quickness. Guest spots gave that world even more dimension. Blurs Damon Alburn, Sha Lennon, and a guest spot from Prince Paul. But it was Alburn's appearance that would plant the seed for Dan's next major project. When Deltron 3030 dropped in May 2000, critics held it as a masterpiece. One of the great concept albums in rap history. Delron show 3030. Dell kids macaroni and then elevator. Right, quick little break before we dive into Dan's work with the gorillas. If you're into cinematic, soulful vintage inspired samples, we make our own sample packs and you can check those out on our website. And right now all the packs are buy one get one free if you just use the code second course at checkout. And if you just want a taste, we've also got some free packs that you can grab. And you can check those out on the link in the description. Anyway, let's get back to the important stuff. The Deltron 3030 project didn't just cement Dan the Automator's reputation for building immersive worlds. It also caught the ear of blur frontman Damon Alburn. Alban had been quietly sketching ideas for a virtual band, one that could live inside its own animated universe. The concept was ambitious for fictional members illustrated by Tankirl co-creator Jamie Hullet. But by album's own admission, the music needed some extra help. I kind of got sort of 75% way through the album and then I found I couldn't really go any further. So I rang Dan up and he brought some amazing characters into the picture like Adele Funkam sapion and sprinkled a bit of Dan Nakamir fairy dust over it and uh Burillas was creative. Dan took the reigns on production for him. It was simply the next evolution of what he'd done on Deltron 3030, blending genres to match the world he and the artists were building. And in a way it was a Deltron reunion. The breakout single Clint Eastwood brought Dell back into the fold. Voicing the animated character Russell Hobbs and delivering verses that sounded like they'd stepped right out of the Deltron universe. But now set against a hypnotic dub groove and Alburn's melancholy hook. Gorillas became a global phenomenon, selling over 7 million copies, winning a Brit award, and redefining what a hip-hop producer could do in the pop world. For Dan, it was validation that skills he'd honed in the underground, the genre hopping production, the conceptual storytelling, the collaboration between wildly different artists, could resonate with a global audience without losing its edge. By the early 2000s, Dan Automator had built quite a reputation, turning unlikely ideas into fully formed worlds. In 2000, he teamed up with Mike Patton and Jennifer Charles for Love, a tongue-in-cheek Serge Gainsburgh inspired concept album of Lounge Meets Trip Hop. And he didn't want to limit himself to the hip-hop world either, producing rock records for Cassabian, scoring films like Books Smart, and even exploring French pop cinema. Throughout his career, there's been one thing that's been constant, collaboration. The real magic of producing records or making interesting stuff is hearing what someone else has say might spark an idea in their head where you can do something that you wouldn't have thought of without them. That's I think the true form of collaboration at that point. From a tiny blue room in his parents' house to selling millions and soundtracking Hollywood films, Dan the Automator has shown that the most interesting path isn't the one everyone else is on. It's the one you invent yourself. And if you're a producer who loves to collaborate, share samples, or just chat about music, we've just launched our Discord community for producers and beat makers, and we'd love to see some of you in there. And you can check those out on the link in the description. Also, if there's any other producers, albums, or topics you want me to cover on the channel, just let me know in the comments.