Swing

The following comes from an interview with Roger Linn in Attack Magazine.

Swing – applied to quantized 16th-note beats – is a big part of it. My implementation of swing has always been very simple: I merely delay the second 16th note within each 8th note. In other words, I delay all the even-numbered 16th notes within the beat (2, 4, 6, 8, etc.) In my products I describe the swing amount in terms of the ratio of time duration between the first and second 16th notes within each 8th note. For example, 50% is no swing, meaning that both 16th notes within each 8th note are given equal timing. And 66% means perfect triplet swing, meaning that the first 16th note of each pair gets 2/3 of the time, and the second 16th note gets 1/3, so the second 16th note falls on a perfect 8th note triplet. The fun comes in the in-between settings. For example, a 90 BPM swing groove will feel looser at 62% than at a perfect swing setting of 66%. And for straight 16th-note beats (no swing), a swing setting of 54% will loosen up the feel without it sounding like swing. Between 50% and around 70% are lots of wonderful little settings that, for a particular beat and tempo, can change a rigid beat into something that makes people move. And unlike the MPCs, my new Tempest drum machine makes it very easy to find the right swing setting because you can adjust the swing knob in real time while the beat plays. I first introduced swing – as well as recording quantization – in my 1979 drum machine, the LM-1 Drum Computer.

Regarding sequencer resolution, the LM-1 – used on all of those early hits by Prince, Michael Jackson, and many others – had a sequencer resolution of 48 parts per quarter note. (48 parts per quarter note permits swing variations of 50, 54, 58, 60, 62, 66, 70 and 75%, and I rarely need more swing increments than this.) The Tempest has a resolution of 96 parts per quarter note but almost all of the great grooves it makes don’t use more than 48 parts per quarter note resolution and often no more than 24.