By: Ebony Anderson-Brown

BUILDING BEATS WORKSHOP LEADER & MUSIC PRODUCER EL BLANCO NIÑO HAS SOME TIPS TO CREATE A JERSEY CLUB TYPE BEAT, USING THE FREE BROWSER-BASED MUSIC PRODUCTION PROGRAM SOUNDTRAP. YOU CAN ACCESS SOUNDTRAP ON YOUR LAPTOPS, PHONES, AND IPADS USING THE CHROME BROWSER.

Today we’re going to learn how to make a Jersey Club type beat on Soundtrap. But first, what exactly is Jersey Club? You probably have heard it before, or you might have heard your friends listening to it on TikTok videos or even just on the internet. You may hear these random remixes to songs and it has this very dancy, energetic feel to it.

Jersey Club music has been created by this next generation of producers that have been influenced by the club music coming out of Philadelphia and Baltimore. It includes the culmination of the rhythms that they heard in Philly and B-more club music while also interjecting more sampling, using chops, plugins, and different effects to achieve a unique remix to your favorite songs. Really, the beauty in Jersey Club comes from the type of samples, loops, and sounds that producers use to make a song very creative. It is very engaging and calls you to the dancefloor immediately when you hear that infamous Jersey Club rhythm.

We’re going to go over how to create the Jersey Club rhythm, also how to use certain effects to get that Jersey Club sound.

Let’s get started by writing the drum patterns by going into the Patterns Beat Maker view in Soundtrap. One drum kit that we can use to achieve that Jersey Club drum sound is the Old School Tape kit. This drum kit is really good because it samples a Roland 808 drum machine, but that tape saturation gives it this extra pop, warmth, and body that a lot of Jersey Club music features right now where you have very heavy drums throughout the track.

To create the Jersey Club rhythm, you can start with a typical four kicks per bar, but you might want to add another kick to give it an extra thud. The tempo of most modern Jersey Club music has been getting faster over the years, so you’re going to speed the tempo here up a bit so it’s not too slow (El Blanco Nino has his track at 145 BPM).

Now, you’ll start to hear that it has that bounce, that kind of rhythm that will get you knocking your head. Sometimes, in Jersey Club songs, they’ll also have the hi-hat going at the same pattern as the kick to accentuate the kick due to the fact that it might have a lot of low end. To get that extra punch or clipping noise, you’ll have to add the hi-hat on top of the kick. 

There are many variations that can be created here, but this is just the initial pattern. You’ll want to play around with the sounds here a bit to get a feel of what you’d prefer to hear. Whether you want to keep it basic or not, that’s up to you.

After you have a rhythm going, you can just build on top of it by adding elements such as vocals or snares. You’ll find that a lot of the samples in Soundtrap are pretty fun. Once you’ve got all of the instruments in mind for your song, you can go ahead and add some delay effects to some of the elements. 

After you’ve layered your vocals together, you can start adding different drum sections if you want. The quickest way to do this on Soundtrap is by splitting regions and then changing the drum section. You’ll want to start adding more progressive elements and usually in Jersey Club music, producers use a lot of classic dance breaks that you hear from sampled records such as James Brown, Lynn Collins, or even the Winston Brothers. In Soundtrap, they don’t have those breaks, so you’ll have to improvise by figuring out a substitute for your drum break or by importing the breaks into Soundtrap.

What you can do to improvise within Soundtrap is to look at the Loops, specifically percussion, and see which one would give the best results as you cycle through them.

This sums up how to begin creating a Jersey Club type beat. It is really about just honing in on chops, playing around with different arrangements and using effects, such as delays and echoes, so that it doesn’t sound so raw. The effects will give it a bit of atmosphere and when you hear it in the club, it will get you in the mood to dance with all of the different sounds, chants, and alarms that Soundtrap has to offer.

Thanks for tuning in; if you enjoyed this, stay tuned for our other How-To videos!