> An interactive tool with audio examples demonstrating downbeats, offbeats, and different swing ratios can be found on our website (https://www.ds.mpg.de/swing/swingratio).
This demonstrates the basic component of swing - off-beat delays. As the article explains, this is not enough, but there should also be additional down-beat delays for the soloist. Thus, the soloist and the rhythm section play with slightly different swing ratios.
Closer to 2 sounds better to me; I wonder if it's that so much of the "swung" stuff I've been playing in the last few years is really jigs (and so naturally close to 1:2)
I can't really dance, but if I try to twitch or spasm in my seat in time with the music I find that I'm most conformable doing one movement per quarter note. The tempo is fast enough that I can't really keep up if I try to do a movement per eighth note.
With the swing ratio set to 1 I find it easy to get out of phase in those sections where it has a bunch of consecutive eighth notes. The tempo is fast enough that I can't dance and count reliably at the same time, so if I get out of phase I'm stuck that way until it hits a section with longer notes.
There's no way to tell if a given eighth note is the downbeat or not just from its relation to the preceding or following notes so I can't reorient myself.
With higher swing ratios the downbeat note and the preceding note are grouped, and the gap between these groups is larger than the gap in the group. I can't get lost in that.
If the tempo was slower, I could either count while dancing or dance to eight notes and would be fine with a swing ratio of 1.
Jazz bassist here. If I take my time from the band, everything slows down. I have to follow my own internal time clock in order to maintain a steady tempo. Or, the rhythm section has to do so as a unit.
Former Jazz bassist as well. Blew my mind when I was in school, all of my teachers insisted that I was the timekeeper, not the drummer. The band might listen to the drummer, but the drummer needed to listen to me.
Once I left school, it quickly became apparent that each band has their own preference for who they should follow. But, that pressure on me really gave me a strong sense of time and rhythm that I tremendously appreciate to this day.
It's interesting that the "rule" seems to be that the bassist is the timekeeper in jazz, but in a lot of bands, the players habitually lock to the drummer. I'm ready for it to go either way. In my main band, I have a good rapport with the drummer (we've been playing together for 20 years), and so we are a pretty tight unit. Sometimes if the drummer has to miss a rehearsal, then it's just me, and I don't mind reminding the band that they can trust the bassist. It's kind of like driving in heavy traffic. You might not completely trust the cars in front of and behind you, but choosing your own speed is fraught with risks. ;-)
One of my favorite tracks where I think you clearly hear that the bassist is setting the time is Thelonious Monk's "Green Chimneys": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C-uJw1AiPA
The bassist is playing incredibly steady quarter notes throughout, except for some liberties during his own solos. The drummer is free to set accents as he sees fit. And if you were to take your time from the piano… may God have mercy on your soul!
There's the whole concept of "ahead" or "behind", although as a keyboardist it's never been clear to me which to go for. Sometimes a tension is counseled, like bass being ahead of the beat and soloist being behind. Or it can be tempo-specific. Curious if you can share more along those lines from a bass perspective?
i'm an amateur drummer, i never fully grasped ahead / behind formally, all I know is that when I practice patterns, there are times where a mishap causing a slight delay will confuse my brain into feeling an acceleration (like sense of time being borked for a second).. I wonder if they play around that sensation.
I am a bassist and do wonky times a lot, I can still recall the feeling you describe — but nowadays I only get it when I have to play really wonky stuff that goes against the tempo of the rest of the band.
So I would say this feeling goes away with practise. The less you have to think about the timing the less weird it feels when you stretch it.
List to some drummers that play with the J Dilla style of beats. For example JD beck. Basically you just play certain beats ahead or behind the beat but do it consistently and it sounds "right" but wonky in a very cool way. It's hard as shit to do for me I have trouble enough playing on time lmao
Even questlove said it Was alienating at first (D'Angelo voodoo sessions).
But beyond the nusoul / nujazz world. I can also sense this in Copeland drumming. But in a nearly invisible feel.
And recently I stumbled upon Taylor McFerrin+ thundercat collab. Their drummer was having fun laying crazy shifted patterns, but not on the bottom level. It was different.
A lot depends on the band. I'm not a pro, so I've played with bands at varying levels over the years. There are bands where everybody is instantly lost, the moment that I start my solo. They either lose the tempo or the "form", so they have no idea when to come back in. These tend to be bands that haven't completely mastered jazz playing.
Then on the other end of the scale, there are bands where it seems like the time is just magically "there" through nobody's effort.
I adapt. If the band needs time during my solo, I play a more chunky rhythmic solo. If the time is "there" then I can take more liberties.
I have some personal rules that the band doesn't always obey, such as no bass solo when people are dancing. Playing for dancers is its own beast. If I'm given a solo while people are dancing, I usually play a slightly more fancy version of the regular bass line, and keep it short.
swing comes from way more than implying 12/8 or however you want to charachterize shortening the ands- its also how you phrase, its your volume, and your articulation. some basic ideas here: https://youtu.be/Fg_W-t_WBBc
but its also about where you sit in the beat, and how you push and pull. i think ethan iverson said something like "a mans eighth notes are between him and god". ultimately trying to explain swing is like trying to say why a face is pretty... theres some basic ideas, but they only account for part of it
Not conveyed in the title: this is the soloist's note placement in relation to the drummer's. I'd be surprised if this wasn't also true in non-swing styles like rock, etc where "front line" instruments get their time cues from the bass and drums. What feels like perfect synchronization to me is in reality a 20ms delay.
Someone in my PhD lab looked at this and commented that they weren’t that impressed. The authors didn’t account for the fact that ballads and uptempo numbers have vastly different swing ratios (in both cases practically straight) which skews the results. I think rhythmic phenomena and perception are worthy of study but this isn’t a great example imo
From the article: "A quadratic fit to the data (gray line) as an indicator of preferential swing ratios reveals an increasing trend as a function of tempo up to 160 bpm and a decreasing trend above 160 bpm."
The author goes into a lot of detail about what swing is, its origins in African music (polyrhythms) and the racial tensions that came from these rhythms, and how it eventually made its way into modern music.
Can also vouch for this book. I'm about halfway through and I absolutely love it, though I'm biased because I've always had a penchant for anyone or anything that fucks around with musical time. There's a documentary being put together based on the book as well, which I'm really looking forward to.
A discussion involving swung time and J Dilla needs a Chris "Daddy" Dave mention, too. That dude is in a different universe from the rest of us when it comes to time.
I read an article online long ago, telling how he told amp fiddler how he made beat, by aligning tapes with a pencil to overlay samples one by one. I never found that article again and I wonder if his wobbly swing came from the lack of time grid here.
The most noticeable, iconic component of swing is the upbeat delays, of course.
Actually this subtlety with the downbeats could be one of the differences between "smooth jazz" and the real thing. Smooth Jazz tunes use pop beats. There may be swing, but the downbeat in that musical format is typically mechanically steady.
"Smooth Jazz" isn't a musical genre, it's a radio programming format. A very restrictive one, for that matter, with probably only a few hundred songs tops in it.
I'm no musician but I tried to learn a bit of gypsy jazz rhythm guitar. I think it is relatively 'easier' to swing with gypsy jazz style because of the staccato mimicking the rhythm section. Again this is just an observation from a beginner. The rhythm section of a big swing band is very complex.
This is great!