Swing and feel

Clap along to a jazz or blues record and say “da-da da-da” with the eighth notes. It won’t fit: the band plays “doo-ba doo-ba”, a long note and a short one, in every beat. That unevenness is swing, and it is why a shuffle bounces and a pop song doesn’t.

The Swing control

Swing sits in the playlist’s toolbar, next to Loose, and on the chord sheet, next to the key and the tempo. Drag the number up or down, from straight (even eighth notes) to 100%. Try it on File > Demos, Midnight Shuffle, while it plays: the drums, the piano, the bass and the harmonica all change their feel together, and not a single note moves in the piano roll. Swing is played, not written: the notes stay on the grid, and playback moves the second eighth note of each beat later. Saving keeps it, Ctrl+Z takes it back, and WAV and MIDI exports play it.

How long is the long note?

The 100% row is how textbooks explain swing: split the beat into three (a triplet) and play the first two parts as one note. That is why jazz charts write plain eighth notes with “Swing” over the first bar: writing every pair as a triplet would fill the page with brackets and threes. Real players don’t stick to one ratio. They swing harder at slow tempos and even out at fast ones, where there is no time for a long-short pair, so try the whole range.

A swung pair is not the same as a dotted eighth and a sixteenth (3 : 1). That is a rhythm of its own, sharper, like the “Hap-py” of Happy Birthday, and swing leaves it alone: it only moves notes that sit on the second eighth note of a beat.

Styles and swing

Each style brings its own swing: Swing, Jazz ballad, Jazz waltz and Shuffle at 100%, Rock and roll at 50%, most others straight. Change it, and the style remembers: the next time you pick it, in any song, it plays with your amount. The Library’s Swing option (see Styles and the Library) says whether a style brings its swing to the song. The swing is the whole song’s, so it swings the melody too, as a jazz singer swings the tune.

A section in another style (see Song form and sections) swings as that style does: a swing bridge in a straight pop song swings its eighth notes, and a rock section in a jazz song plays them even.

Where swing doesn’t apply

A shuffle is the blues’ name for the same long-short feel, usually a full triplet. Some blues are written in 12/8 instead, four beats of three eighth notes each, the triplet feel written out (Trouble in Mind in the demos). So the control is greyed out in 6/8, 9/8 and 12/8: the beats already split in three, and there are no pairs to swing. The same goes for 5/8 and 7/8, whose beats are the eighth notes themselves. It works in every time signature counted in quarter notes or half notes, such as 4/4, 3/4 or 2/2.

Hip hop, funk and “new jack swing” swing their sixteenth notes instead, the pairs inside each eighth note. This control swings eighth notes only.

Loose timing

Loose, next to Swing in the playlist’s toolbar, makes notes land a little off the grid, as when a person plays: from off, as the app starts, to 40 milliseconds. Each note starts up to that much late, a different amount each time, and the notes a player strikes together move mostly together, so a chord is a little late as a whole, not spread out like a harp. The same song sounds the same each time you play it, and a WAV export sounds like playback.