Getting Started With Joey Cartagena's Production Style
If you have been trying to recreate the sound Joey Cartagena brings to Joey Bada$$'s records, you are going to run into some walls pretty fast. The approach is not something you can pick up from a YouTube tutorial alone. It involves a very specific chain of processing and arrangement choices that do not follow conventional hip-hop beat-making rules. I spent probably six months figuring this out by A/B comparing his beats against my own attempts. The core of it starts with drum sound selection. Cartagena does not use the standard 808 trap kit most producers reach for. His kicks are punchy but short, sitting around 80 to 100 hertz with very little sustain. I was using a standard 808 kit for months and could not get the kick to hit the way it does on tracks like "Paradise" or "All American." The workaround was finding a sample from an older soul record, chopping it down to just the transient, and layering it under a lightweight sub kick. That layering approach alone shifted my beats from sounding generic to something closer to the actual cadence of his work. The snare is equally specific. It is tight, often cracked, and sits higher in the mix than most modern boom-bap snares. You will notice it on "Window Pain" — that snap cuts through densely layered instrumentation without needing aggressive compression. I tried running my snares through parallel compression with an 1176-style plugin and hit a wall. The transients got lost. What actually worked was sending the snare through a tape saturation sim and then a multiband compressor with the upper mids pushed just slightly. Not much. Like two decibels. That is what gives it that cracked quality without losing weight.
Arrangement Patterns
Here is where the style gets interesting. Cartagena rarely builds a beat the way most producers do. He does not start with a loop and loop it until the track is done. He arranges sections based on song structure first, then builds individual elements to fit. I used to spend hours constructing a 16-bar loop and then trying to force a song structure on top of it. That is backwards. Start with the song. Decide where the verse, chorus, and bridge go. Then construct or choose sounds that occupy specific frequency ranges in each section. One thing beginners consistently miss is how Cartagena handles the low end during transitional moments. When a track moves from verse to chorus, the low end does not simply drop out and come back. It evolves. He will switch the bass pattern, layer a different low-frequency element, or subtly filter the existing bass line. This creates forward momentum without relying on risers or sweeps, which most producers lean on heavily. I added a second sub bass playing a complementary pattern during the chorus of one of my beats and immediately noticed the energy shift. It was not subtle. It was exactly the kind of move he makes.
Sample Selection and Processing
Cartagena sources his samples from obscure soul, jazz, and funk vinyl. He does not pull from Splice packs or free sample libraries. This matters because the recording quality of those original sources affects how the samples behave once they are processed. Older vinyl has a natural high-end roll-off and harmonic saturation that younger digital recordings do not have. When processing samples, he tends to run them through a combination of analog-style EQ, light distortion, and sometimes a bit of pitch shifting. The pitch shifting is not for creative effect alone. It is often used to adjust the timing or to find a new key that fits the rest of the instrumentation better. I encountered a specific problem when trying to replicate a particular vibe from a Joey Bada$$ track. My sample sounded muddy once I added drums and bass. The issue was that the original vinyl had already occupied certain midrange frequencies, and layering additional instruments on top was creating masking. The solution was to sidechain the sample to the kick drum using a compressor with a slow attack and fast release. This allowed the kick to punch through while the sample receded slightly. It took me two days to figure this out by trial and error. The process usually takes an experienced producer about an hour if they know what they are doing.
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Common Pitfalls
There are a few traps that catch people who are trying to adopt this style. The first is over-compressing the master bus. Many producers cranking their levels end up squashing the transients so much that the beat loses its dynamic range. The result sounds loud but flat. Cartagena's beats maintain a healthy dynamic relationship between elements even at high volumes. Another pitfall is relying too heavily on preset chains. There are plenty of "lo-fi hip-hop" or "boom-bap" preset chains available for common plugins. These are fine as a starting point but they will not get you to a professional sound on their own. Each element needs individual attention. Your bass needs its own EQ curve. Your sample needs its own treatment. Your drums need to sit in a mix that has been thought about rather than assembled quickly.
What to Use
You do not need expensive gear to approach this style. A DAW, a decent pair of headphones or monitors, and a handful of plugins are enough. FL Studio works fine. Ableton Live works fine. Logic Pro works fine. The tools do not matter as much as the decision-making process. Focus on selecting the right samples, understanding how they interact with other elements, and building your arrangement with intention. If you want a reference point for the overall sound, check out the album Forever by Joey Bada$$ and the mixtape Blessed. Listen to how the elements sit relative to each other. Pay attention to what is absent as much as what is present. Cartagena often leaves space in arrangements where most producers would fill every frequency. That space is intentional. It is part of the style. I cannot give you a download link for his actual templates or projects because those do not exist publicly. What exists are the beats themselves, and studying them closely is the only real path forward. It is slower than most people want, but it is the only method that actually works.
