Swing primer

“It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing, doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah” – Duke Ellington

Hear a seamless collage of several varieties of swing:

Aside from the blues, swing is the United States’ most significant musical innovation. People typically associate its rubbery, sensual feel with jazz, but swing is everywhere in the musics descended from the African diaspora: ragtime, blues, musical theater, country, R&B, rock, funk, reggae, hip-hop, electronic dance music, and so on. The best way to learn about swing is through aural and hands-on experience. The Groove Pizza is a good way to get started.

The basic definition

You create swing by alternately stretching and squeezing the two halves of each beat. Say you’re in 4/4 time, and you’re counting subdivided beats like so: one and two and three and four and. To swing, you stretch the onbeats (the ones, twos, threes and fours), and you shorten the offbeats (the ands.) The more you alternately stretch and squeeze the subdivisions, the more heavily you swing.

Here’s a geometric visualization: to swing, you expand the onbeats (the green areas) in the clockwise direction, and shrink the offbeats (the white areas) to fit.

This Groove Pizza beat shows the effect of gradually increasing swing. It begins by playing straight eighth notes. Each time it goes through the pattern, the onbeats get a little longer and the offbeats get a little shorter.

It might seem wrong to think of a sensual and ineffable quality like swing in such drily mathematical terms. There is certainly more to swing than just the timing of note onsets or drum hits. Swing also depends on how long the notes or hits are, how loud they are, and their articulation. It’s interesting, though, that simply changing the timing of every alternate note onset by tiny amounts has such a profound effect on the feel of the music. People are exquisitely sensitive to rhythmic nuance, even if they aren’t necessarily conscious of it. Swing is a way to infuse strict metronomic time with human warmth and urgency. It takes deep focus to swing, but it also requires relaxation. This zen-like state is difficult to attain, but once you learn to do it, you will never want to stop.

Listening examples

Here’s Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy” played without swing:

And here it is with swing:

Here’s JS Bach’s Concerto for two violins in D minor, without swing:

And here it is with swing:

For an even more direct comparison, here’s a two-bar drum machine pattern I made, playing alternately without swing, then with swing. Pay particular attention to the hi-hats (the innermost circle):

Swing is not tied triplets

You may have seen swing defined as a tied triplet feel, in which the first subdivision of each beat is twice as long as the second one:

This is not what swing is! Or, more accurately, this two-to-one subdivision ratio is a specific kind of swing called a shuffle, also known as 12/8 feel. Here’s a song using 12/8 shuffle, “Truckin'” by the Grateful Dead.

This may technically be a form of swing, but it is not what jazz musicians are talking about. The two-to-one ratio is only one among infinitely many possible ratios between the lengths of the first and second subdivisions in each beat. The subdivisions might be more equal in length (lighter swing), or more unequal in length (heavier swing). The specific ratio you use depends on the style and tempo of the music. For example, you typically use lighter swing at faster tempos and heavier swing at slower tempos. Jazz players used heavier swing in the 1930s and 40s than they did in the 50s and 60s. The variations are endless.

To make things more complicated, swing ratios are not static. You don’t necessarily stick to one ratio throughout a tune. You might use heavier swing at the beginning of a phrase and lighter swing at the end of it. Drummers will also sometimes use different swing ratios simultaneously. For example, on Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon,” Harvey Mason uses heavier swing on the kick and snare drum, and lighter swing on the hi-hat.

Eighth note swing vs sixteenth note swing

One major point of confusion around swing is what beat level you are supposed to be swinging at. If you go on any music forum where they’re talking about swing, you’ll see jazz-trained musicians saying that you’re supposed to swing your eighth notes, while beatmakers say that all their software and hardware is swinging the sixteenth notes. They’re both right, but in different contexts. This is because Black American music underwent a significant shift in about 1960: the basic pulse unit changed from eighth notes to sixteenth notes. Jazz and other styles of American vernacular music from before 1960 swing at the eighth note level. However, funk and other American vernacular music styles from after 1960 swing at the sixteenth note level. If you want to sound jazzy or old-timey, you should use eighth note swing. If you want to sound funky or more contemporary, however, you should use sixteenth note swing.

Stevie Wonder’s classic “Superstition” begins with four bars of his drumming, which uses heavy sixteenth note swing.

I’ve visualized the first measure below in Ableton Live.

The grid lines are sixteenth notes. You can see how the hi-hats on the sixteenth-note offbeats are consistently late. (Stevie is also a little late on his quarter notes, which contributes to the overall laid-back groove.)

To help you hear the difference between eighth note and sixteenth note swing, compare two recordings by the Jackson 5. First, here’s “Rockin’ Robin,” which uses eighth note swing to evoke the 1950s:

Next, here’s “I Want You Back”, which uses sixteenth note swing for its funk groove, and sounds much closer to the present:

Ray Charles’ arrangement of “You Are My Sunshine” is the rare piece of music that includes both eighth and sixteenth note swing. Most of the tune uses funk-style sixteenth note swing, but during the horn break at 1:00, Ray switches to jazz-style eighth note swing.

The eighth vs sixteenth note issue is especially confusing for rock musicians, because rock straddles both the eighth note and the sixteenth note eras. When you hear 1950s rock, like Chuck Berry or Buddy Holly, you’re hearing eighth note swing. When you hear rock from the late 1960s and afterwards, you’re hearing sixteenth note swing… unless the band is deliberately going for an old-timey, bluesy or jazzy vibe. The Grateful Dead, for example, did a lot of jumping back and forth across eras. “Sugaree” and “Truckin'” use eighth note swing, while “Franklin’s Tower” and “The Music Never Stopped” use sixteenth note swing.

When we created the Groove Pizza, we weren’t sure how we should label the slices. We ultimately decided not to specify what beat value each slice represents. You can think of the slices as being eighth notes or sixteenth notes, or quarter notes or thirty-second notes for that matter. When you apply the swing parameter, you can think of it as operating at any beat level you want.

Tuplet swing

If you subdivide your beats by odd ratios, like five or seven, it is possible to produce some intriguing swing ratios. Shawn Crowder of Sungazer enjoys using quintuplet swing, where the onbeat is three fifths of a beat long, and the offbeat is two fifths of a beat long. This creates a feeling that is almost triplets, but not. Your ear can tell that there is a specific relationship between the onbeat and offbeat, but it can’t quite tell what it is. That gives quintuplet swing a “drunken” feel.

You can also get a cool drunken feel with septuplet swing, where the onbeats are four sevenths of a beat long, and the offbeats are three sevenths of a beat long. I can only produce this kind of groove in Ableton; I can’t dial it in on an instrument yet.

An analogy: Walking

Get up and walk around (or watch someone else walking.) Focus on your hips. Is your pelvis moving along in a straight line, or is it swinging left and right with each step? If you are marching, or otherwise holding yourself rigidly upright, your pelvis won’t swing very much. However, if you saunter, sashay, strut, or swagger, your pelvis will swing from side to side like a pendulum. The wider your hips are swinging, the sexier your walk is. (Fun fact: in gait kinematics, the side of your pelvis doing the movement during a given step is called the swing side.) The analogy to music could not be more perfect: straight rhythm feels like marching, while swung rhythm feels like sauntering, sashaying, strutting, or swaggering.

Swing, groove, and syncopation

When people speak casually about jazz, they sometimes use the words swing, groove, and syncopation interchangeably. Jazz does use all three of these things, but they are separate rhythmic concepts. Syncopation is the effect of accenting unexpected beats. It’s something that happens occasionally at the surface level of the music. Swing, on the other hand, happens continually at the level of the underlying metrical grid. Latin music uses lots of syncopation, but it rarely swings.

Here is a rare piece of Latin music that does swing:

Conversely, old-timey country music swings heavily, but doesn’t use much syncopation.

Groove is harder to understand, since it doesn’t have a straightforward definition. I define groove as the unpredictable microrhythms that performers create when they deviate from the metronomic grid. For example, here’s the iconic Clyde Stubblefield break from “The Funky Drummer Parts One and Two” by James Brown, as visualized by Ableton Live:

All these little discrepancies combine to give the Funky Drummer break its unique groove. If you quantize Clyde’s playing exactly to the grid, it gets noticeably less funky.

To be clear, the Funky Drummer break does have light sixteenth note swing, and that contributes to its groove. But the groove is the sum total of all the microtiming variations, not just the ones that are the result of Clyde’s swing.

Digging deeper

Like I said, there’s more to swing than just the timing of your note onsets. Here’s a more detailed discussion of swing from David Bruce that gets into all the other factors at work:

David explains how MIDI and drum machines made it possible to quantify the tiny rhythmic nuances of different grooves and feels. Digital audio workstations also make it easy to see the exact placement of drum hits relative to the tempo grid. David also discusses how soloists use different swing ratios from drummers, and yet are able to align their offbeats with the ride cymbal by slightly delaying their onbeats. The formal study of swing is still in its early stages; the more people examine it, the more depth and complexity it shows. Of course, if you’re a jazz or funk lover, you already knew that, but it’s nice to see the classical music world catching up.

Notating swing

How do you notate swing? The answer is: you don’t. There is no standard way to even describe swing ratios, much less to represent them on the page. So in practice, you write your swung rhythms the same way you write straight ones, and then you just put the word “swing” at the top of the page. The only way to convey a specific swing feel is to make a recording.

Notation programs may not be able to visualize swing, but they can at least play it back. However, there’s a catch: most notation programs only support eighth note swing. This is because the styles that use sixteenth note swing usually aren’t notated to begin with. If you do want to make a chart of your funk or hip-hop tune, you are out of luck. The support forums for Finale and Sibelius unhelpfully suggest that if you want sixteenth note swing, you can just write everything in cut time. (I have done this, and I do not recommend it, it just confuses your band.) The only notation programs I know of that do support sixteenth note swing are Noteflight and Dorico.

Learning to swing

You can learn to understand different ratios by adjusting the swing setting of a drum machine or DAW and playing along to the result. In Ableton Live, the Groove Pool contains a variety of different swing settings. Logic Pro can quantize your MIDI using many different swing settings as well. But technology can only take you so far. You should also listen closely to lots of actual music, and play, sing, and dance along with it.

“Sid’s Ahead” by Miles Davis is a great swing tutorial. It sounds harmonically abstract, but it’s basically a blues in F. If you just play the note F over it, or the F blues scale, it will sound fine.

Don’t worry about playing anything too melodically interesting; just play simple riffs and try to get your timing locked in with that ride cymbal.

To practice your triple meter swing, try “Contemplation” by McCoy Tyner. Play the C blues scale, or C natural minor.

To hear a big band swing as if they all share a single mind, listen to Count Basie play “Lil’ Darlin’.” It’s not a difficult melody to figure out, but getting the swing dialed in this precisely takes a lot of practice.

For country-style swing, you can’t do much better than Willie Nelson. His time is idiosyncratic, but it’s also deep in the pocket.

Reggae is all about sixteenth note swing. You can practice it with Sister Nancy’s classic “Bam Bam.”

J Dilla’s futuristic take on swing is a vast subject unto itself, but you can get a taste of it here:

Happy swinging!

Read this post in Spanish on Deviolines

References

Benadon, F. (2006). Slicing the beat: Jazz eighth-notes as expressive microrhythm. Ethnomusicology, 50(1), 73–98.

Butterfield, M. (2010). The power of anacrusis: Engendered feeling in groove-based musics. Music Theory Online, 12(4).

Danielsen, A. (2010). Musical rhythm in the age of digital reproduction. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.

Dittmar, C., Pfleiderer, M., Balke, S., & Müller, M. (2018). A swingogram representation for tracking micro-rhythmic variation in jazz performances. Journal of New Music Research, 47(2), 97–113.

Friberg, A., & Sundström, A. (2002). Swing ratios and ensemble timing in jazz performance: Evidence for a common rhythmic pattern. Music Perception, 19(3), 333–349.

Hein, E., & Srinivasan, S. (2019). The Groove Pizza: A study in music and HCI. In S. Holland, T. Mudd, K. Wilkie-McKenna, A. McPherson, & M. M. Wanderley (Eds.), New directions in music and human-computer interaction (pp. 71–94). Springer.

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Pressing, J. (2002). Black Atlantic rhythm: Its computational and transcultural foundations. Music Perception, 19(3), 285–310.

Roholt, T. C. (2014). Groove: A phenomenology of rhythmic nuance. Gordonsville, VA: Bloomsbury Academic.