The Absence of Swing

The lost art of sampling has led to an absence of swing. Swing is the concept in music that allows rhythm to exist beyond notation. Swung rhythms can be notated, I don't mean they can't exist, but playing a rhythm that's swung is all about feel. This challenges the formulas that are built with straight notes.

The absence of swing has a lot to do with the loss of sampled drums. Sampled drum loops, drum fills, and percussion loops are not as prominent in modern music. Most of the time, drums are programmed. Drums can be programmed to be swung, but it requires very specific processing. This describes how the drums are drawn in, but also how they're mixed. To me, programmed drums need to have the proper tone to glue together and sound right in swing. With a sampled drum loop, you have to follow the rhythm of that loop. A lot of the time, you can't just drag a sample into your program and line it up perfectly with the tempo. This means you can't draw in a melody because it falls out of line with the drums. This can actually be great, it allows a song to feel alive. Whether you figured out how to program it to feel real, or you played along with the sample, it'll feel different than a programmed beat. That doesn't necessarily mean it'll be better, a programmed beat does have a distinct feel to it. It just means that a song that follows a swung rhythm will have its own feel.

Playing straight or swung is no better than the other. It's all about what the theme of the song is asking for, how it needs to feel. It's important not to limit yourself and get stuck in a formula. It's easy to fall into a routine programming straight rhythms, "Fill each two steps, clap on 3." It can also be so frustrating when you have an idea with a sample, but you can't get everything to line up. In a case like that, try to remember that it's about how the full song sounds. As a producer, you're able to zero in on each part of the track, because you know how everything sounds separately. Doing that is like zooming in on one corner of a painting and saying it looks off. If you're having trouble lining something up, add more to the track and use that to find your rhythm. Say you have a melody and you're having trouble adding a kick, use a hi hat loop.

Don't be afraid of swing, it's the most fun concept in music. It's what makes a song feel like it was played by a human, not programmed on a computer. Understand the formulas that come with rhythmic notation of straight notes, and do everything you can to defy them in swing.

Thank you for reading.