Juke

What it is

Chicago house parties in the late nineties ran on ghetto house at 145, and the dancers kept asking for it faster. By about 1997 the DJs were playing at 155 and up, and the tracks being made for those rooms were juke: a four to the floor kick with sixteenth-note ornaments hung off it, a clap pattern that pushes rather than sits, and a vocal sample repeated until it stops meaning anything. It matters here that juke and footwork are not quite the same thing, and this site has a separate entry for footwork in the IDM family. They share a tempo and a city. Juke is the club form and keeps the four to the floor and the backbeat clap, so a room can dance to it. Footwork is what the battle circles turned it into a few years later, and it breaks the kick into triplet clusters and abandons the backbeat entirely.

What it sounds like

Loud, dry and repetitive in a way that is the point rather than a limitation. An 808 kick with the decay long enough to be a bass note, a clap or a snap on the backbeat, and a rimshot doing quick figures between them. Hats barely feature. The vocal is a two or three word phrase looped for thirty two bars, pitched and stuttered, and it usually says something obscene. There is no chord progression and often no bassline separate from the kick. Everything is close-mixed with no reverb, because it was made on a cracked copy of a tracker or a sampler and mixed on the speakers in somebody's basement.

Key elements

• The four to the floor keptThe kick stays on all four beats, where footwork keeps only 1 and 3 and leaves the backbeat to nothing. This is the clearest single difference between the two on a grid, and it is why juke reads as club music and footwork reads as a challenge.
• The pushing clapClaps on 2 and 4 but also on the a of 2 and the last sixteenth of the bar. That push is what makes a juke track feel like it is speeding up when the tempo has not moved.
• Kick ornamentsExtra sixteenth kicks hung off the main four, tuned so they read as bass notes rather than drums. An 808 with a long decay does both jobs at once, so no separate bass part is needed.
• The looped phraseTwo or three words, sampled, repeated for thirty two bars and stuttered at the phrase end. Repetition past the point of comfort is a deliberate technique here, not laziness.
• The rimshotDry, high and quick, filling the space where a hi-hat would be. Real tracks fire these in triplet bursts that a sixteenth grid can only approximate.

How to get them

• Start with an 808 kick and tune itSet the decay to about 400ms and tune it to the root of your sample. At 160 that means each kick rings most of a beat, and the bass part of the track is finished before you have added a bass part.
• Keep the kick on the beatsAll four beats, every bar, then hang extra sixteenths off them. The moment you take the downbeats out you are making footwork instead, which is a fine thing to make but a different one.
• Push the claps forwardClap on 2 and 4, then add one on the a of 2 and one on the last sixteenth of the bar at slightly lower velocity. Those two extra hits are the entire difference between this and ghetto house.
• Roll the rimshots by handProgram the skeleton at sixteenths, then halve the grid twice and turn two or three of the hits into triplet bursts. Play them in from a pad rather than drawing them, and do not quantise the result fully.
• Loop the vocal past comfortTake a two word phrase, loop it for thirty two bars without variation, then stutter the last syllable for a bar. If it feels like too much, it is probably about right for this music.
• Mix it dry and monoNo reverb, no stereo widening, everything centred except the rimshot. These tracks were made and played on systems where the low end is enormous and everything else is a detail.

Reference points

DJ Deeon, DJ Slugo, Paul Johnson, Jammin Gerald, DJ Funk, and the Dance Mania catalogue. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as a list to copy.