Joe Mansfield – The Unkut Interview

Starting out as a promising young DJ and producer in Boston, Joe Mansfield was responsible for the first Ed OG album and was heavily involved in Scientifik‘s tragically short career, while also producing some amazing white label remizes with DJ Shame and Sean C. as the Vinyl Reanimators. He also started Traffic Entertainment and Get On Down, while amassing an incredible collection of drum machines, some of which featured in his first book, titled Beat Box – A Drum Machine Obsession. I had the chance to pick his brain last Friday on all things drum computer…

Robbie: How did you start working with Ed OG?

Joe Mansfield: I was doing beats at the time, trying to find MC’s that were willing to rhyme over some of my tracks. A friend of Ed’s, this guy Money 1, was someone I working with and he happened to live nearby me. He brought Ed by my basement studio one day and we kinda clicked. I started making tracks for him and through that process we came up with his whole first album, pretty much.

So the Awesome Two were involved more in an A&R kind of role?

Yeah, they were more executive producers – Ted was Ed’s cousin. We would record tracks at my studio – well, my basement. It wasn’t a real studio, it was pretty primative. On the weekends, Ed would go up to New York and bring ’em to his cousins to check out, so they shopped the tracks to labels and got the record deal. I did the beats and they handled the financial end of that record. The backbone of everything was done in my basement and then I would go up to Power Play with my sequencer and my sampler and just dump everything down there.

What equipment did you use for that project?

I used an ASQ-10, it was the sequencer part of the MPC-60 without the sampler part or the drum pads. Rodger Linn made that. At that stage I couldn’t afford an MPC. It was agreat sequencer, really easy to work with. At taht time I had an 808, I would have used some of the hi-hat every once in a while, and I had an Emax sampler, which is made by E-MU, so it sounds alot like an SP-1200. It has the same filters and you get the same gritty sound but it’s a keyboard sampler. The tamborine from “I Got Ta Have It” is from the Roland R-8 drum machine, and the snare from “Be A Father To Your Child.”

What about your work with Scientifik?

He was from Ed’s crew, so while we were recording the album, Ed and I teamed-up and signed Scientifik to that company. The same time I was working on Ed’s first album I was also recording Scientifik in my basement studio every other day. They were The Most Blunted tracks, and by the time we finally ended up getting him a record deal, some of those started to get a little older so we didn’t use many of them for Criminal. We brought in new producers and started doing new stuff. The first label that wanted to sign him was Loud Records, and we didn’t end up taking that deal. Steve Rifkind made us an offer we were really close to signing, and at the time we were just kids and Chemistry offered us more money and we went with them. Looking back, it was a bad move because I feel that Loud would have put something behind him and he would have been a lot bigger. He got slept-on just because he fell through the cracks. He was a really good MC. Chemistry didn’t push it because they were having financial troubles at the time and the label was falling apart.

At least you got a Diamond D beat out of it though! A lot of the loops on The Most Blunted turned up on other records too, like “I Ain’t The Damn One” rocking the “Memory Lane” beat that Nas used.

Yeah, I recorded 50 tracks with Scientifik and by the time we recorded Criminal it startered sounding old to him. In hindsight it would have been cool to revamp that and use it on Criminal with new vocals, but it didn’t work out.

What was the first piece of equipment you ever purchased?

The first drum machine I ever bought was a used [TR] 808 out of a classified ad in the paper when I was fifteen years-old. I was a big fan of Run-DMC and Bambatta, so I was interested in the sound of the 808 when I figured out what it was, to try to remake “Planet Rock” ot whatever. I originally bought the machines to augment my production and it grew from there. In the early 90’s I would go on the road a lot, record hunting. I would drive from Boston across the country and stay on the road for weeks, searching out record stores in other cities just to find loops and beats and rare groove stuff. I would also shop at thrift stores to find records and they would sometimes have instruments or stereo gear. So on those trips I found a lotta drum machines that were really cheap. The little ‘Rhythm In A Box’ machines that were always cheap and people just disregarded them, but I always thought they looked and sounded cool and I would just buy ’em when I saw ’em, ‘cos they were like ten or twenty bucks. After years when I made a bit more money I could buy the more expensive ones but I just kinda got hooked on ’em and just kept buying ’em.

When did you realize it had become an obsession?

I had already experienced an obsession with record collecting where it got to a point where i couldn’t fit my records anywhere and they would take up my whole basement. Between the stacks of drum machines and stacks of records, I couldn’t move. For someone who wasn’t into music it would look like a madhouse, like, “Why would somebody have all this stuff?” [laughs]

I always had the idea that Duke Bootee used the Linn Drum on those Beauty and the Beat singles. Would you agree?

It sounds like he would have been using the DMX or the DX. Around ’86 or ’86 you could switch out sounds in those machines. If you had a DX you could get all the Linn Drum sounds and put it in there by switching out the EPROM chips on these machines. There were companies that would make EPROM chips that had 808 sounds that were samped on the computer chips so you could take out from the existing chips with the standard sounds. I’d like to talk to him though, because whatever machine he used he got a really great sound out of it.

How did you source all of those original print ads for the machines in the book?

When I had the idea of the book I had all of the drum machines and a lot of the manuals but I didn’t have the advertisements, so over the last three years I started collecting magazines to find that stuff. I would know the release date of some of the drum machines through my research and the try to anticipate which magazines some of those machines would run ads in and buy a whole series across a year to find which ones had the ads in them.

What inspired you to start Traffic Entertainment?

Being in the business for a while I was always interested in the distribution end. I worked at Landspeed Records for a while and left there with some people I met to start Traffic with Sean C. to put out stuff that we liked. Later we started the boutique label Get On Down to showcase design elements along with the music and present stuff in a really elaborate way. There were cool rock releases with super elaborate packaging but nobody was doing that with hip-hop and we felt like that needed to be done.

Is there a ‘holy grail’ machine that still eludes you?

There’s a machine called the EKO ComputeRhythm that’s super expensive. When they come up they go for up to $10,000, so I don’t know if I can spend ten grand on a drum machine. I recently found one that’s been on my list for a while from a guy in Perth, Australia last week. It’s not quite as rare as the other one but it’s a machine called the Acetone FR-15.

Do you plan to make a follow-up to the Beat Box book?

Two drum machine books might be a bit much, but if I could do another one I’d like to do it on the super-obscure ones that I only touched apon in the book. I had to give people enough that would recognise from songs that they loved. Even a book on the guy who invented the 808 would be cool, maybe [Dave] Tompkins, he’d be good for it. I’m not enough of an author to do the research – I’m just a drum machine guy who wanted a book of drum machines.