In beat making, there exist two spatial factors that are often overlooked: time-sensitive density and swing. We’ll be taking a look at the latter in this article, as there are a lot of beat makers who have not paid enough attention and have not applied the most basic principles of using swing on drum samples and instruments.
A lot of music producers (especially ones just coming into the game) will often question all the fuss about using swing on drum samples and other tracks in a beat. The answer given on a lot of forums and blogs is usually something like this: the human ear loves variance. If every drum beat was to fall on the exact time grid of quantization, it wouldn’t sound very pleasing. This is also the reason concerts are so popular. We’ve heard all the great songs already – countless times – but hearing them with some variation in drums and vocals is very appealing! If the artist instead simply played their CDs for the audience while lip-syncing, it wouldn’t be good at all. Not half as appealing as live instruments with the possibilities of mistakes.
If you’re tapping out drum samples, then using swing is like quantization – it will help you keep on time if you’re not very accurate at the moment. Even if you are spot-on, it will apply your hits to the groove/swing template.
What exactly is the swing we’re talking about, you ask? Swing, in music production, is a quantization level that can be adjusted and custom made. A lot of hardware devices have their own swing settings. It’s nearly the same as snap-quantization except that the hits are a little off every time to give the beat a humanization factor. For a 50% swing, there is no variance at all, it lands on the grid. Going up one level to 51%, though, the swing would be one percent off either way. It can be random or hard-coded into a groove template. The famous MPC swing is hard-coded into the MPC, for example.
Swing templates are especially useful when combining drum samples tracks with electronic instruments like synthesizers – these ‘synths’ do not have any swing applied to them by default (most of the time), so using a swing setting on them along with a straight drum track, or the other way around, can get you some good results. You can also just quantize the drum samples and the electronic synth and simply use a swing setting on one other sound in the song.
Using swing settings for drum samples is an acquired skill, and starting with percentages between 51% and 65% is a good start for most budding producers or those already established who had not delved into the rhythmic aspect of swing. There are various styles of templates that have come directly from groove machines like the MPC 2000 and so, and these can be useful to replicate the swing that legendary hip hop producers have used for countless classics.
Want to find out more about drum samples? Then visit http://www.mydrumsamples.com/ for all your needs.
