understanding groove/swing

richie_stix

richie_stix

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Aug 14, 2008
:wave: Easy all... trying to get my drum beats to the next level and remove the metronomic sound to them and get them swinging and grooving... as i understand swing/grove is essentially a method of replicating 'human errors' when playing the drums to give beats a more natural feel.

This is the kind of thing you can apply to beats and hear the results, but i like to understand what i'm doing rather than just prodding away at various presets.

Any tips, advice, theory etc welcome!
 
Sc0tty+1 said:
In my production course at uni my tutor adivsed not to use the snap function an have every other beat just out of time to give it a more natural feel an stop it feeling so robotic
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youve been watching the windows 7 commercial in the gym again havent you!??? :teeth:
 
read the quote of scotty+1

Says something about snapping...

reminded me of the new jarrin windows 7 add where the guy claims the 'snap' funcion came to him whilst he was at the gym or some bullshhhhh

thought it be lost on the majority...
 
I dabbled with the groove features of Ableton (groove pool) but found more comfortable creating my own manually. I used to use it a lot for hi hats and perc, that's about it though.
 
There's different things here.
Losing the metronomic feel is about quantisation (snapping) Your daw may be set to 'snap' any midi notes to a certain setting (1/4 notes, 16th notes, whatever) This and also having all notes a constant velocity won't help it sound natural.
So to make your beats lose the machine gun feel you could switch off quantise and move them around by a few ticks here and there. This is a bit annoying I reckon and I usually just alter velocities to give different hit strengths.

Swing is where your (1/4, 1/8 + +) notes are not evenly spaced, but 1,2 and 3,4 are closer together, like ta,ta ta,ta ta,ta

And groove is the human element imparted on a beat that kinda involves all of the variations to make it unique/memorable/fit the tune. I don't have all the info but it's something like pushing the snare after the beat makes it sound bigger, bringing hits slightly forward of the beat makes it more frantic, ...just making that up but you get the drift.
 
druu said:
I dabbled with the groove features of Ableton (groove pool) but found more comfortable creating my own manually. I used to use it a lot for hi hats and perc, that's about it though.
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Battery has a humanise function, but it's not that great either. Human is human I guess.
Swing can be done ok with a quantise template first, and then manually altering some bits to humanise.
 
subprime said:
There's different things here.
Losing the metronomic feel is about quantisation (snapping) Your daw may be set to 'snap' any midi notes to a certain setting (1/4 notes, 16th notes, whatever) This and also having all notes a constant velocity won't help it sound natural.
So to make your beats lose the machine gun feel you could switch off quantise and move them around by a few ticks here and there. This is a bit annoying I reckon and I usually just alter velocities to give different hit strengths.

Swing is where your (1/4, 1/8 + +) notes are not evenly spaced, but 1,2 and 3,4 are closer together, like ta,ta ta,ta ta,ta

And groove is the human element imparted on a beat that kinda involves all of the variations to make it unique/memorable/fit the tune. I don't have all the info but it's something like pushing the snare after the beat makes it sound bigger, bringing hits slightly forward of the beat makes it more frantic, ...just making that up but you get the drift.
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cool... so far so good, i do usually alter velocity but leave the snap on to get that movement...

i also appreciate 'grove' is the intricicies of the beat, but on ableton there are so many different 'swings', i'm not sure what does what?

ie 'mpc 58' supposodly recreating the swing available on the old mpc's, but what does the 58 refer to (goes from about 46 to 68 i think?)
 
clone a snare, put some reverb on it, then reverse it and have the reverb run into the orignal snare. works a treat. doesn't answer any question about swing and groove but it can take away any unnatural sounding silence in the break
 
groelle said:
id say just play with velocitys, add some hits randomly, or take some out and so on. most important, LISTEN! ;)
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listening is what i have been doing for years... i learnt to produce through trying rather than studying, and now i know how to get what by ear i'm trying to learn the theory behind it so i know what i'm actually doing, rather than 'if i twiddle this, this happens'... ya get me?
 
yeah.

but i dont know if this is essential, especially regarding "swing" and "groove" as this is imo highly subjective. it rolls or it doesnt, no need to know the theory here.

i didnt even know there were any theory :D
 
groelle said:
yeah.

but i dont know if this is essential, especially regarding "swing" and "groove" as this is imo highly subjective. it rolls or it doesnt, no need to know the theory here.

i didnt even know there were any theory :D
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pretty much gave me the answer right there then :D
 
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