Swing Feel

[rrayner]

For those of you who are interested in this thread, I have added another example of the usage of the variations outlined in my first post on Swing Feel. See/hear the full version at: Yesterdays

My septet version of “Yesterdays” contains more of the attack/duration manipulation detailed in my initial post. I have added a sample with this post to illustrate the differences in the traditional ways of notating swing music, with my special swing manipulation last for you to hear the difference between the three examples. I have only included the horns and the bass for the examples. The first sample (A) is the “old” standard way of notating swing, i.e., the dotted eighth/sixteenth note pattern. The second example (B) is (to my ear) the closest you can get to notating swing feel, i.e., quarter/eighth note triplets. To my mind, this notation is a little harder to read as there is a little bit more ink on the paper (the bracketed 3). Notation Composer has the very nice feature that allows you to write this style of swing notation (called Standard Rhythm) and convert it to Swing Rhythm. This looks cleaner to the player, because the quarter/eighth note pairs are replaced with eighth notes, i.e., the conversion to Swing Rhythm for B would make it look like C -- a lot less cluttered. The score and the individual parts would have to instruct the players to perform the piece with a “swing feel”. This is the best of all possible worlds for writing and reading swing music, however, as discussed in my original post, the feel when Notation is playing the piece is not the way it would sound if a human swing band were playing it -- the dotted eighth/sixteenth notation is too herky-jerky and the quarter/eighth triplet notation is close, but not close enough to my ear. My goal in writing these swing pieces is to be able to play along with my Clavinova, which is “my band”, as I don’t have a local group of part-time musicians to play with. Therefore, I want “my band” to play as close to what this human will play. The best I can approximate this is heard in example C -- notated as described in my original post.

Admittedly, the differences are subtle -- the difference between A and B being the most noticeable, as A is a little bit choppier. The difference between B is C is a harder to hear, but I can feel it when I play along with the Clavinova. The bottom line is that it is personal taste.

Ralph Rayner