The importance of natural swing in your music.

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RWise
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The importance of natural swing in your music.

Post by RWise »

Something that i think makes tracks very robotic and dull in techno these days is people creating music that is too on grid.

The more small details and subtleties you implement in your music, the better and more professional it will sound. And one thing that i think is not thought about enough but can take your music to the next step, is the importance of natural swing. By this i mean not working to the grid in your DAW.

Having different elements very slightly off grid creates a special kind of groove that makes things feel more human. Now this doesnt mean your music has to sound like its obviously off grid and too wonky; This can either be an extremely subtle effect, or more obvious. Combine this with things like subtle velocity changes and general automation and your music really starts to open up and get a natural groove.


If you use analogue synths and fx with hardware sequencers, this is a good way to achieve that swing as i find a lot of the time when i record synth sequences into audio, they are in time to the desired bpm, but when i zoom into the audio, it is not perfectly on grid. When i listen to people like Slater, Bicknell and others who are in the A-game for production, their music has a special groove and feel. I find this a lot with 90s records as well, as the live sequencing of hardware meant that everything wasnt perfectly locked onto a digital grid and therefore everything was a little bit looser, which in my opinion, sounds a lot better than perfectly on grid beats.

I hope some of you understand my waffling :)
Last edited by RWise on Sat Oct 21, 2017 5:42 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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jordanneke
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Re: The importance of natural swing in your music.

Post by jordanneke »

Since i'm starting to make more house influenced stuff, I keep my shitty timings when recording. In fact aside from kicks, I pretty much record every clip a number of times, until I'm satisfied with my natural 'swing'.

It does indeed give a more organic feel.

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Re: The importance of natural swing in your music.

Post by RWise »

jordanneke wrote:Since i'm starting to make more house influenced stuff, I keep my shitty timings when recording. In fact aside from kicks, I pretty much record every clip a number of times, until I'm satisfied with my natural 'swing'.

It does indeed give a more organic feel.
Yeah, i usually only have the kick perfectly on time. But when i start to build elements around the kick that are all naturally off, it even starts to make the kick sound a bit more swung and gets the groove going a lot more.
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Re: The importance of natural swing in your music.

Post by dubdub »

Beyond the obvious point that music that's completely on the grid is boring, there's an interesting discussion to be had here: Can you really get that 90s techno feel by playing stuff in and dragging midi notes around? Because I've been trying and I can't get there - which seems logical since obviously they didn't do that, it's more or less all sequenced on the grid with the only off-grid variations coming from hardware timing variations and latency and maybe drum machine and sampler swing/shuffle. I think I'm going to try using more groove templates and general track delay instead of dragging stuff around by hand.
Last edited by dubdub on Sat Oct 21, 2017 6:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: The importance of natural swing in your music.

Post by RWise »

dubdub wrote:Beyond the obvious point that music that's completely on the grid is boring, there's an interesting discussion to be had here: Can you really get that 90s techno feel by playing stuff in and dragging midi notes around? Because I've been trying and I can't get there - which seems logical since obviously they didn't do that, it's more or less all sequenced on the grid with the only off-grid variations coming from hardware timing variations and latency and maybe drum machine and sampler swing/shuffle.
I noticed a drastic difference when i started making music with a lot of hardware compared to just using my computer. Trying to emulate the 90s feel on the DAW with midi was so tedious and the results i got were never that convincing. However, when i started messing with hardware synths and sequencers in real time, i managed to get the sound id been chasing with much more ease.

but im not just talking about trying to sound '90s' - its more trying to make my tracks sound like 'a proper record' and for some reason just clicking around some midi notes and exporting to a wav doesnt give me that feel. If that makes any sense...

I think from a creative and sound aspect, everyone should try and use a hybrid of hardware and digital IMO. It would drive me mad trying to just make techno on a computer...
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Re: The importance of natural swing in your music.

Post by Mono-xID »

BUT... BUT...But it's Techno!!! It IS music for robots, it's machine music. It's future.

I'll take a "on grid" Steve Bicknell loop over some swung out tech/house track anytime.
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Re: The importance of natural swing in your music.

Post by Southpaw »

That's just a personal choice like anything else in a track you might do, would totally depend on what feel you're going for. Very early Electro/Techno stuff is very rigid and I presume people were inspired by early Kraftwerk who were obviously all about the machine/robot thing so if you were doing something inspired by that music, you'd probably leave 16ths on the grid as if robots were indeed doing the music.

Personally, I prefer getting a bit of shuffle in there for the most part. Housey stuff really needs it that's for sure and you can go pretty far out with that sort of thing there. I'm not one for this nudging midi notes off the grid manually though because one of my pet hates are unintentional flams and sloppy timing with confused transients. If I'm gonna add swing in there, I do it on a global basis and apply it to all my parts as I much prefer a groove that's locked in rather than one part rigid and another with shuffle. I just don't like that at all and find it irritating even to listen to.

The only things I nudge around manually are things with slower attack times. Certain percussive stuff like shakers spring to mind as do certain clap sounds but I can't be done with manually nudging say each 16th in a sequence to find a groove, it just gets a bit messy and if I didn't mimic that in any other sequence that had 16ths, the resulting flams/smeared transients would drive me nuts.

I don't even bother with these groove template things either, if I want swing, I just quantize to a triplet percentage. So say I had a 16th hihat pattern, I select to quantize to 16t and then specify the amount/strength. 100% would obviously be full on triplets but lower amounts just start adding enough to get things shuffling a bit, 15%, 20% or for housier stuff I like to go at least 50% or upwards. If you play stuff in, unless you have zero latency, it's never gonna be your 'playing groove' anyway so I just have quantize on during recording and deal with grooves when I get to them. Just my preferred way of doing things, everybody is different I guess.

Velocity is another one, I read of some people using devices for random velocity changes like Abletons Velocity device. That's not for me either, velocity combined with shuffle are 2 things that I like to spend time on to get the feel I want, if there's something I want randomizing, it's not these things. I like the 3 step velocity process of soft, med and hard for the main bulk of pattern sequencing, obviously not all the time but generally, I don't need all the tiny amounts in between and if I want more or less range between soft and hard hits on something like a hihat, after the pattern is laid out, I just adjust the velocity to volume based around that 3 step thing rather than increase or decrease the velocity of each midi note.

I'm not sure how much this affects groove but to my ears it does, I sometimes prefer making sublte timbre changes based on velocity too, like say a hihat again. Quieter hits being slightly 'duller' than brighter ones and with less transient info, ie: softer. Only a subtle thing as it sounds weird if it's obvious but in a sort of minimalistic context when a part is right out front, I think these little details add a certain something for sure. In fact the whole thing about timbral change via velocity is something I try to incorporate on most sounds as for me, it's all tied in with the overall feel.

Most of these things are pretty obvious anyway, nobody has mentioned envelopes, modulation and even compression, would be interesting to get some takes on these too.

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Re: The importance of natural swing in your music.

Post by Lost to the Void »

Sometimes locked and rigid relentless beats are also good.
Depends on the tune. Loose and draggy, or swung out, or utterly rigid and industrial.
Whatever feels good for the tune.
Looking backwards as a measure of what is good is ass.
Good is what feels good.
Old cranky hardware groove templ8s are as valid or invalid as modern whatever.

This is machine music.
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Re: The importance of natural swing in your music.

Post by Pelecaras »

Speaking as someone with a preference for harder-edged techno, I love the machine-like 'assembly-line' (for want of a better word) feel in tracks, don't get me wrong...swing is great but it's not essential to me.

Go with what feels good to you I say.
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Re: The importance of natural swing in your music.

Post by Pelecaras »

Mono-xID wrote:BUT... BUT...But it's Techno!!! It IS music for robots, it's machine music. It's future.

I'll take a "on grid" Steve Bicknell loop over some swung out tech/house track anytime.
I'll drink to that
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Re: The importance of natural swing in your music.

Post by RWise »

I think some people are slightly misinterpreting what im saying. Im not saying to always add OBVIOUS swing to your music. Im just talking about not having everything exactly on point on the digital DAW grids.

So even if youre making a super straight rigid groove, literally have the audio transients off the grid lines here or there by whatever milliseconds/semi-milliseconds. Super subtle stuff but ultimately will still give your track an interesting feel. Because the straight edged stuff that is made on hardware machines will have these subtle beat movements and wont be on a perfect grid like you can do on digital platforms.


It might sound like im banging on about the obvious 'dont be on grid and robotic' but im saying go a little bit deeper than that for the digital realm in terms of very very slightly pushing things away from the grid lines even if youre making super straight stuff.

Just ma opinion anyway gentlemen :)
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Re: The importance of natural swing in your music.

Post by Lost to the Void »

RWise wrote: So even if youre making a super straight rigid groove, literally have the audio transients off the grid lines here or there by whatever milliseconds/semi-milliseconds. Super subtle stuff but ultimately will still give your track an interesting feel. Because the straight edged stuff that is made on hardware machines will have these subtle beat movements and wont be on a perfect grid like you can do on digital platforms.

And some of us are saying that sometimes FUCK super subtle shifting and fuck hardware machines. Everything has its place, and some times razor precision to a grid is itself it's own thing. Something that hardware can't do. Play the strengths where you find them.

Whatever is right for the tune. Techno is not something where everything is measured against some hardware crap made in the 90s.

Techno is about technology and progress.
Old machines, new machines, rigid, loose, whatever the fuck, just do your thing and make it sound right in and of itself.

I personally will make loose shit when I want to make loose shit, I'll use hardware when I want to, and sometimes I like utter mechanical precision.
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Re: The importance of natural swing in your music.

Post by winston »

RWise wrote: By this i mean not working to the grid in your DAW.

Combine this with things like subtle velocity changes and general automation and your music really starts to open up and get a natural groove.

:)
all this takes time and experience in judgement to get right. you can make a 1 bar and cmd-D or whatever and have 32 bars drawn out in seconds. i think in fruityloops you can just drag the mouse and it copies the loop over forever.
velocity changes also takes ages as you need to listen to it over and over to check it is correct, the same for different swing values on different instruments.

wasn't the thing about early 90s techno and house that it was all one take, mixed live? so there was different triggers and midi with different sample delays built into the machine and one swing value per drum machine and the machines were hot because they'd been on for 12 hours, but not the synth by the window, that's not hot because your boy there has the window open because he's toking the reefer and his mam's downstairs so it can't stink the place out, so that synth is slightly out of time from the others.

i was reading a GS thread on mpc live yesterday because i was thinking of getting one and they were arguing about sample delays once the sample is triggers. if you done it in software it was 16 samples, but on the machine it was 65 or something. like what the fuck? they wanted cunts to check it for themselves because this nanosecond was noticeable to their ears and was ruining the experience for them.

i agree with you in principle though, there needs to be a groove, some funk and hopefully some soul. everything is just so meaningless and plodding. but then i partly think that is because i haven't been to a club and heard it loud, everything is out of context. like if someone kicked you in the balls, you'd be like "fuck this, man, this sucks", but if you were in a basement sex club tied to the water pipe and you were kicked in the balls by a chesty blonde (man or woman, i know how subsekt is about these things) you'd think "i'm getting back into the swing of things".

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Re: The importance of natural swing in your music.

Post by Mono-xID »

:lol: Winston on point as ever.
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Re: The importance of natural swing in your music.

Post by buffered »

RWise wrote:

If you use analogue synths and fx with hardware sequencers, this is a good way to achieve that swing as i find a lot of the time when i record synth sequences into audio, they are in time to the desired bpm, but when i zoom into the audio, it is not perfectly on grid. When i listen to people like Slater, Bicknell and others who are in the A-game for production, their music has a special groove and feel. I find this a lot with 90s records as well, as the live sequencing of hardware meant that everything wasnt perfectly locked onto a digital grid and therefore everything was a little bit looser, which in my opinion, sounds a lot better than perfectly on grid beats.

I hope some of you understand my waffling :)
yeah it's also about the dynamics of the elements too. How they move in and out of eachother when compressed together. All the anomalies that an analogue circuit will bring from event to event audio wise.
It's funny because at the time, getting all your machines to sync perfectly was the dream and going about it was a huge pain. Now these eccentricities are being reverse engineered.
And it's not just about the events being on or off grid, many times swing is achieved by very subtle delay sends or reverb pre-delay times.
Always thought Mike Dehnert is one of the best practitioners in terms of swung percussion.

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Re: The importance of natural swing in your music.

Post by Snarf »

It fun to sample some old funk/disco and jam to it, live and unquantized, with diffrent drums. Then remove the sample to see what you get left.
Also to emphazie groove, try to use call/response alot with diffrent dynamic phrases.

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Re: The importance of natural swing in your music.

Post by Southpaw »

winston wrote:like if someone kicked you in the balls, you'd be like "fuck this, man, this sucks", but if you were in a basement sex club tied to the water pipe and you were kicked in the balls by a chesty blonde (man or woman, i know how subsekt is about these things) you'd think "i'm getting back into the swing of things".

:lol: :lol: :lol: An obvious analogy!

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Re: The importance of natural swing in your music.

Post by Planar »

Lost to the Void wrote:Sometimes locked and rigid relentless beats are also good.
Depends on the tune. Loose and draggy, or swung out, or utterly rigid and industrial.
Whatever feels good for the tune.
Looking backwards as a measure of what is good is ass.
Good is what feels good.
Old cranky hardware groove templ8s are as valid or invalid as modern whatever.

This is machine music.
This doesn't fit the itb < otb rhetoric though!

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Re: The importance of natural swing in your music.

Post by Lost to the Void »

Planar wrote:
Lost to the Void wrote:Sometimes locked and rigid relentless beats are also good.
Depends on the tune. Loose and draggy, or swung out, or utterly rigid and industrial.
Whatever feels good for the tune.
Looking backwards as a measure of what is good is ass.
Good is what feels good.
Old cranky hardware groove templ8s are as valid or invalid as modern whatever.

This is machine music.
This doesn't fit the itb < otb rhetoric though!
Just wait a few years and all the mindless pweebs will be told that OTB is crap and ITB is great.

Meanwhile Creative Musicians make music with the tools they have at hand, mindless pweebs wait to be told what to do with trend approval.
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Re: The importance of natural swing in your music.

Post by dubdub »

If the current trend of perpetual formualic cultural recycling continues, in 10 years everybody will go crazy over the sound of early 2000s vintage VSTs. It'll go, man, check out that vintage Rebirth I downloaded the other day, sounds so amazingly harsh and digital I couldn't believe it :lol:

I don't think the OTB craze is going to go away though, software just doesn't satisfy peoples craving for some nice heavy consumer fetishism in the same way. Plugin companies are already moving towards subscriptions (same as Apple moving towards subscriptions instead of Itunes etc.), in the end plugins will become just another service like a telephone or cable bill which is about as un-sexy and non-fetishistic as you can get.


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