How can you know if you are actually "swinging"

[pamosmusic]

Okay ... so there's a lot here so I want to go point by point. First of all ... this is a great post.

Ok. I'm not a real player. So, I'm talking mostly out of my ass on this, but I think it's an interesting discussion and appreciate pros' patience with me in discussing it.

I would love to ban the word "pro" on this forum. It's absurd. You seem to be a perfectly knowledgeable dude and you're saying tons of good stuff here. As you've made clear in this post ... there are plenty of "pros" who aren't all that hot. Before I moved up here I was gigging three or four times a week. Now it's more like twice a month and at a net loss. I'm infinitely better now (but still struggling with lots of things) than I was then so the degree of "pro" in my or anyone's pedigree means absolutely nothing and it has zero bearing on the validity of your opinion. So maybe everyone here just stops talking about who's a "pro" and who's not. I apologize but this is not directed at you ... I rather think this post is useful and thoughtful and it irks me that you feel the need to qualify it by saying that you're not a pro. It is what it is .. and what it is, happens to be cool.

The fact that there's some "give" in swing feel doesn't change the fact that a basic, blues triplet feel is the basis for a lot of that swing feel.

That's totally fair and a good point. The elasticity of the feel doesn't make good time any less important.

...in the way the bassist plays his ghost notes/breaks between notes, singers' and horn players' breaths and tongued notes, the rock of the pianist's right hand, the way drummers constantly hit accents on off-beat quarter note triplets. It's all there regardless of whether you're playing triplets or not, and all of it translates to the larger time structure as well.

This is getting more into the stuff I think is super important. Accents and slurs and phrasing things.

The way I hear it, these rhythmic elements (at more moderate tempos) translate to feels (at higher tempos).

I like that.

... but to me, saying "it ain't about tied triplets" is a little like saying "it's all about tied triplets". The fact that some people are over-focused on one aspect doesn't make the other untrue/unimportant, does it? It's hyperbole by omission.

Damn well put. On that point, I will concede defeat. I have a similar reaction to when people describe swing as a tied triplet when it absolutely absolutely isn't ... I just envision a high school band director reading out of a text book to an unsuspecting innocent jazz band and just ruining them. You obviously are not doing that but rather laying out a lot of nuanced stuff about the underlying triplet blues feel in a lot of swing stuff and subdividing and things that you've picked up from all manner of locations which is awesome and different. My apologies.

I think the explanations of swing that resonated most with me were the one from Nicholas Payton about rhythmic freedom which really just blew a hole in how I listened to myself. I now stumble over a lot more interesting rhythms but at least I'm trying to hear them that way.

The other one was a Wynton Marsalis interview (maybe the Ken Burns series?) where he talks about how he thinks of swing as a "lilt" and a sway and forward motion. I really wish I could find the clip because it was very cool. He mentions that brazilian music and other music has a "swing" even though the rhythms are very much different. I liked that a lot.

[matt.guitarteacher]

Please do some etudes on this topic! They'd be great!

For me, it's easiest to work on this stuff with chords of some kind, 3 strings or more. That way, you can assign a string or group of strings to a subdivision of the beat, like a drummer does with alternate sticks or like you do on piano, playing the right hand against the left. And something slow enough to count and play this way (at least at the beginning). I stumbled onto it with playing chord melody, especially this tune "penthouse seranade" from the real book. Anyway, it's mostly quarter note triplets for the opening melody, and then, straight quarter notes for the bridge. Really straight and cheesy off the page, but I was compelled by the "problem" of playing quarter note triplets and not losing reference to the beat, and it was playable at a time when I was just learn some CM. Putting the 8th note triplets in between some of them seemed to help, and eventually, I just liked making an etude of it and subdividing the whole thing, and just moving things around, time-wise.

Howard Morgen arranging process

Anyway, after playing all of those quarter note triplets (with the in-betweens), it's really easy to "accidentally" do some of them on the quarters in the bridge. When you do that, it kind of pushes the melody "ahead" in time, and it becomes a game of seeing how far you can "push" without losing your place. The 3rd video in this linked post shows me doing it with fingers, kind of systematically working through different subdivision ideas. It's more interesting to do with real tunes, and eventually you don't need all of the structure (of playing all of the subdivisions throughout). But it gives a lot of organization to varying phrasing. You can kind of play "in time for rubato" in a way that sounds like you actually know what you're doing.

People always said to just listen to a lot of versions for phrasing ideas, and that's definitely helpful. But this kind of exercise gives you ways to kind of work on your own phrasing sight-unseen, as well. Pretty cool to look at a very straight tune off of a chart and be able to phrase it in passably jazzy way. I do it with a pick as well. I'm sure you could work into a similar etude for single note playing. I just haven't really worked any of that out. Once you can hear it, you don't need the structure as much.

With a pick you could use a simple physical reference of D-U-D, U-D-U, D-U-D, U-D-U. "Miss" the downs, and you've got off-beat-quarter-note-triplets (think Billie). "Miss" the ups, and you've got regular, straight quarter-triplets.

Probably the best way is to use different strings as references, melodically and rhythmically. I'll try to post something later.

[matt.guitarteacher]

Triplet_etude_ideas.pdf
I kind of hate hypothetical stuff like this. I've always just done real tunes, but this is just a basic idea of how you could design kind of a physical reference for counting triplets. (I threw this together quickly. Go ahead and strum the 3-note voicing on the first note of each line too. Should have notated it that way.)

Basically, your ear hears the top note as being the melody. In the first line, that "melody" is quarter notes, (because three triplets equals one beat). That's your basic reference melody, and the others are phrasing variations based on this triplet polyrhythms. On the succeeding lines each first-string "melody note" equals a quarter note triplet, and you can see how it compresses your melody.

If it's a new way of counting for you, line 4 is an easier alternative to line 3. A triplet-based backing track might help a lot as well. Your ear should still basically hear the high note as being the melody, but it's probably easier to count than line 3. The good stuff is when you start adding rests in. The next iteration would be to begin on the 3rd triplet (which is the "& of 1" in swing).

If it's me, I would alternate pick all of this, but the string itself (and the melody) is your reference. Just an idea of possibilities with a pick. I'd definitely be interested in others' approaches to working on this and presenting.

Man, musescore hates the idea of deleting triplets apparently... PDF doesn't render him Tapatalk either. Seem to work on my PC. I'll try to re-render tomorrow.

[vintagelove]

If you have to ask, you'll never know...

[christianm77]

I would love to ban the word "pro" on this forum. It's absurd. You seem to be a perfectly knowledgeable dude and you're saying tons of good stuff here. As you've made clear in this post ... there are plenty of "pros" who aren't all that hot.

+1

[matt.guitarteacher]

Please do some etudes on this topic! They'd be great!

OK. Here's one on Duke Ellington's C-Jam Blues. It's based on a simple principle that 2 "swing 8th notes" are rhythmically equal to 2 quarter note triplets (apart from the duration of the 2nd note. Call it staccato if you like.) It's fingerstyle, but again, you can do similar with pick direction etc. Fingers are far more substantial reference IMO.

I personally think quarter note triplets are easier to hear and play than swung 8ths (if you can't already basically swing), when you learn to hear them as quarter note triplets. You can play them soft and relaxed, and you have more of a perception of them being "even" than you do if you're playing two 8ths which immediately swing into the next quarter note.

edit: Already spotted one rendering error in the D-7. Let me know of other mistakes.

Watch Ella double clapping in that video Groyniad posted. Completely relaxed. Is she clapping two 8ths (swung) or two quarter-note-triplets? Rhythmically they're the same, because clapping has no duration. I've always approached telling people about that two 8ths rhythm by telling them to just get your swinging 8ths going, and then just "miss" beat 2. However, I'd be willing to wager that you could more easily teach a non-jazzer to clap that rhythm convincingly. Clapping to quarter note triplets should be easier than clapping 2 swung 8ths and missing the next beat, even though they're technically the same.

BTW, these exercises just kind of scratch the surface. There's one very basic 3+2 poly implied in the 3rd bar, but the rest is pretty straight. What you're getting into with that last bar though, is the good stuff, you need to be able to work standards this way and really experiment with phrasing.

Anyway, let me know what you think.