J. Pattern’s | The ‘Drake Type Beat’ King
Meet J. Pattern’s. He is a 21 year old producer from Maryland, USA who makes soulful ‘Drake Type Beats’. His collection is a vibe and a half. He has 10+ videos with over 100k views, and 20k+ subscribers who provide his foundational fan base, and he got it all this year. J. Pattern’s is hot right now boy. This is what you call a humble come up.
So what make’s J.Pattern’s all that?
One kid in the comment section put it like this.
J. Pattern appraised in YouTube Comments.
His immaculate ability to sample, and combine versatility is the reason he’s praised. The man is giving you vibes to choose from. One day, giving you nostalgic vibe’s with tracks like ‘I Can Love You’ , reminiscent of Drake’s ‘Nice For What‘ summer banger, and then emotionally fucking you up with tracks like this.
His production is definitely classy, and uncommon in a YouTube world where its popular for producer’s to simply make trap beats that induce audience’s of Lil Pump fans. He aims for the latter, the audience that still misses soulful and polished production. The type of production that elicits emotion from beneath you and makes you feel vulnerable. At the same time, having the ability to hype you up and make you want to talk your shit. These are emotions you can’t buy, but can only obtain through a J. Pattern’s beat.
We got the exclusive chance to speak with J.Pattern’s here at Rap Fiesta.
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Whatsup man. It’s a pleasure to hop on the phone with you and give some shine to you’re artistry. Let’s start with the basics. What’s your name, how old are you where are you from?
My names James Patterson, Im 21 and I was originally born in New Jersey but I grew up in Maryland most of my life.
James Patterson, J. Patterns. I was gonna ask how you got your name but that makes alot of sense.
Yeah somebody called me one day like “Yo! J.Pat” and for some reason I was just looking at my name and I was like, I guess I’ll just make it J. Patterns.
How long have you been making music?
Its going to be 3 years in January. I started in 2016.
Really, because on you’re channel you just started releasing music this year.
The story behind that is, that I had that channel before, but my computer had crashed and I had lost all my beats. So, I had to take all my beats down and I re-uploaded it to some level, but yeah I lost all my beats and had to start all over. It was tough. That was actually a year ago, September 17th. I was going through it that day. Now I carry an external hard drive with me and at the end of week, I’ll transfer it over there so I don’t lose all my shit again.
Do you have any annoying ass haters or does everybody generally show you love? What’s your friends response to your music?
All my friends are supportive 100%. They always brag about it. Every time we go somewhere, or meet somebody they’re always like “Yo he’s a YouTuber and he got 20k subs”. I don’t really get hate. The most hateful thing I’ll hear is like “this beat sucks” or something like that. I’m good at taking criticism though, it doesn’t phase me.
I know where I want to be, and I want to be on OVO, so I said I’m just going to stick with the Drake Type Beats
You’re really consistent with uploading beats. From following you, you upload at least 3 to 4x a week, do you find it challenging to be this consistent?
So yeah it goes back to that day September 17th when I lost all my beats. I told myself “Alright, imma do one beat a day.”, and thats what I did. Every day I would dedicate like 2 hours to making beats and I would come out with 1 or 2 a day, and just upload them throughout the week and I been doing that for a year now. I was actually stuck, and I watched a Mike Zombie interview when Drake’s album ‘Nothing Was The Same’ came out and he said he made 1 beat a day for a year and he made ‘Started From The Bottom’ and that always stuck with me. I just like that mentality.
You’re bread and butter are definitely your Drake type beats. We never see you give in to the common practice of trap beats that are obviously flooding YouTube. Why are you so in love with these Drake type beats, versus popular trap beats?
Pretty much I would look at people’s beats all the time. I would look at their channels, and I would only see beats that were made for whoever the hottest rapper was at the time. I basically just took it as, well I know where I want to be, and I want to be on OVO, so I said I’m just going to stick with the Drake-Type beats. I branded my whole channel off of OVO sound, and I guess I’m lucky that Drake is the hottest rapper alive, but even if he wasn’t I would probably still make Drake-Type beats. I was a Drake fan before anybody really knew who he was. I would wear an OVO sweater and people would be like “Yo, what is that?”. I just really like that sound and its my favorite sound to do. I just engraved it in me.
Have you ever actually tried to get in touch with Drake and get him one of your beats?
I’ve been in contact with a couple people in that area. I got close to doing a beat for PARTYNEXTDOOR, I guess it didn’t get to him. I had somebody’s management hit up GUI who did the beat for ‘Since Way Back’ and they got me to send over beats. I’ve also sent Tory Lanez beats, but I guess it didn’t get picked. I’ve gotten close, but it hasn’t happened yet.
I asked my dad for a beat machine as a Christmas present and I got it. I just sat there playing piano keys, not knowing what I was doing. I just sat there and taught myself
Lets dig a little into the production. I love the way you reverse melodies and go crazy with the sampling. You literally blew my mind with how you sampled D’Angelo’s “Lady“. You even go as far as sampling from songs that you already used. For example, you used this same sample in “Ride or Die” and “I Can Love You” and made it sound like a completely different song. What makes you even want to try this?
The first thing I’ll do when I find a sample is either pitch it down or pitch it up. I’ve used multiple samples multiple times, and some people wouldn’t even realize it. The stuff you can do with any 5 second, or 20 second clip is ridiculous. You can stretch it out, reverse it- it’s insane. So when I hear something, I’ll pitch it down first and then I’ll make the same copy of the same beat and pitch it up and change the drums around. So a funny fact about that beat you mentioned, I thought it was whack when I made it. I thought it wasn’t really that nice, it was just a loop with some drums and people just loved it. That was the one that blew up. I get so many emails every day like “Yo I did this for your beat!”, “Yo I used that for my song”, and its just always that beat.
When I first heard it, it was on “I Can Love You”, and I was thinking like “yo, what song is this? It sounds like a woman singing this shit” and then I heard the other way you flipped it on “Ride or Die” and I was just amazed.
It was the ‘March 14th’ beat off Drake’s album ‘Scorpion’ and he has a lyric about just playing D’Angelo’s ‘How Does It Feel’ and I just went on YouTube, typed in D’Angelo and just picked the first one I saw and that one popped up ‘Lady’, and I was like alright, bet.
(For reference, this is the song he sampled)
He used that sample and turned it into this.
…And this.
(Okay, you get the point. His sampling level is over 9000)
I think a cool quality about you is that you don’t stop at the soft, emotion inducing Drake-type beats. You have a track called “Billion” where it sounds like you loaded in a bunch of fast hats and used a side-chain to add some suspense to the beat in its pauses. It’s more of a banger reminiscent of Drake’s “Trophy’s”. Do you have a preference to the type of Drake beats you make?
It depends on when I’m making it. If I’m making it at night, it’s going to be a little dark, mellow type. For example, I made ‘I Can Love You’ probably at 10 in the morning. I remember I made ‘9 PM’ at 2 in the morning after I saw 40 posted a video. I was really about to go to sleep, but then I went on Instagram and saw the clip. I hopped right up and started making that beat.
Its funny how you named a beat ‘9 PM’ that you made at 2 AM. Why didn’t you just call it 2 am?
I think I already had a beat called 2am. Actually, I know what it was. I had a beat called 8pm and I thought, might as well just do the next hour.
I know you strictly produce, but is there a reason you haven’t thought about being an artist on one of your beats?
Funny story, at first bro- I wanted to be a rapper, like that was my thing. I would write forever, I was like 14 and I swore I was going to be on OVO by the time I was 18. Of course, it didn’t happen and I don’t really know what happened but I sort of just lost touch with rapping. It wasn’t really working to cope with what I was going through because I kept having writer’s block. Then I asked my dad for a beat machine as a Christmas present and I got it. I just sat there playing piano keys, not knowing what I was doing. I just sat there and taught myself. Maybe one day I’ll go back to rapping, on some Nav stuff.
Where do you currently work and is the YouTube money really not enough? Why dont you pursue music full time?
The YouTube money right now is part time. I make like $200 more than I do at my job. If I ever make at least $5,000 a month from YouTube a month then I’ll do that full time. That’s my goal right now. I work at Lowes right now, the people I work with make the job fun. I’m definitely not miserable there though, I enjoy it.
Have you been in talks with any labels?
Na, I wouldn’t even talk with labels. I’ll stay as independent as long as I can. There’s a lot of artists that sign, and they get stuck I always go by Lupe Fiasco, he didn’t want to do those pop songs with Trey Songz. The label would force those, but they told him like “You do this or you’re not getting paid”. So yeah, I don’t want to get stuck like that. I pretty much handle all my business by myself.
I can imagine hitting your first 100k you probably felt like the shit. Was it at this point you knew you had something special? When did you realize you had a gift?
It was like the 3rd beat I ever did, and it got like 20k a week, and I thought it was insane. I had like 200 subs. I deleted the ‘9 PM’ beat originally, I had the track-outs, and when that beat got deleted it had like 40k. When I re-uploaded it, it hit 100k from scratch. That’s when I realized, maybe I can do something with this. I don’t know the secret, everybody always ask me how I get the views and I think its luck.
I peeped you play FortNite with NFL’s Jarvis Landry, the Cleveland Browns Wide Receiver. How did the relationship develop enough for yall to be playing Fornite together?
He DM’d me on Instagram one day and said ‘Yo, I really like this beat. I was like “What, is this really Jarvis?”. I sent him a bunch of beats, he actually wants to do a little project. Of course football postponed that, but I’m pretty sure once the seasons over he’ll get back in it. That’s my dude though. Every time I see him on TV, its like “Yo I know that guy!”. He took a picture with Ninja too and I was like “Yo we should probably play FortNite with Ninja” and he was like “Bet.” Definitely dope meeting him.
What is the most satisfying feeling you’ve encountered this far into your career?
Probably hitting like 4 million views. Can’t believe it’s gotten this far. I used to always want to be like a gaming channel, but yeah man I still can’t believe it.
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