What swing is, and why it feels good

Tap your finger evenly on a table: tick tick tick tick. That is straight time. Every tap is the same distance from the last.

Now make every second tap a little late: tick...tick tick...tick tick...tick. Long, short, long, short. That is swing. Nothing else about the rhythm has changed, and it feels completely different.

Hear it

Here are hats on every other pad, played straight. Press play and listen to how evenly they tick:

Those hats sit on the beat and halfway between, which swing does not touch. Swing moves the pads between those, so fill them in and press play on both of these:

Same pads, same tempo. In the second one every soft hat arrives late, and the rhythm starts to walk.

And this is a jazz ride cymbal pattern, heavily swung:

That lopsided ding, ding-a ding is the sound of swing turned up high. Drummers did not invent it from theory. It is simply how walking feels: your steps come in pairs, and the pairs are never perfectly even.

It is a dial, not a switch

Swing is a matter of degree.

• None. House, techno, most rock. Machines and marching.
• A touch. Hip-hop, funk, a lot of pop. You would not call it swung, but it would sound stiff without it.
• A lot. Jazz, blues, early rock and roll. The second note lands so late that each beat feels split into three, with the middle piece missing. This is a shuffle.

Here is a shuffle. Same idea, more of it:

Why late feels good

A rhythm where every note is equally spaced gives your body nothing to predict. Swing sets up a tiny tension and releases it, twice every beat: the late note makes you wait, and the next beat arrives right on time to pay you back.

It is the same reason a rocking chair is more pleasant than a vibrating one.

The famous accident

Early drum machines could only play perfectly straight. Then one added a swing setting that delayed every second sixteenth note by a chosen amount, and producers discovered that somewhere around 55 to 60 percent a rigid machine pattern suddenly sounded like a person. A great deal of hip-hop was built on that one knob.

Try it yourself

Every project has a Swing slider. Put a plain pattern of hats on every other step, press play, and drag the slider slowly from zero. Notice the exact moment it stops sounding like a machine. Notice the moment, a bit further on, when it starts to sound drunk. Your taste lives between those two points.

There is a whole chapter on swing where the pads slide to show you how late they play. If you want a rhythm to try it on, the drum pattern generator has a swing control too.