Module 5: Rhythm and swingLesson 1intermediate⏱ 60 min + 10 min daily for two weeks

Swing eighths and the jazz feel

Understand swing as a triplet subdivision, learn how the ratio changes with tempo, accent and articulate your eighth notes like a horn player, and practise with the click on 2 and 4.

Why swing comes before vocabulary

You can play the right scale over the right chord and still sound nothing like jazz. The missing ingredient is almost always rhythmic: the eighth notes are even, the accents are on the downbeats, and the notes are either all short or all long. Change those three things and the same notes suddenly swing. This lesson isolates those three things and gives you drills for each. Spend two weeks here before you expect any line in later modules to sound convincing.

Everything in this lesson is played on single notes or simple chords you already know, because the subject is when you play, not what.

What swing actually is

In classical notation, two eighth notes divide a beat in half. In swing, two written eighth notes divide the beat unevenly: the first is long and the second is short. The most useful model is the triplet subdivision. Imagine every beat divided into three equal parts, a triplet. A swing eighth-note pair takes the first two parts for the first note and the third part for the second note. The first note is twice as long as the second: a 2:1 ratio.

The first example writes the same bar three ways: as straight eighths, as the triplet notation that shows exactly what swing means, and as the quarter-plus-eighth triplet that some charts use.

\tempo 100
.
\ts 4 4
:8 5.3 5.3 5.3 5.3 5.3 5.3 5.3 5.3 | :8 5.3{tu 3} -.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} -.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} -.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} -.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} | :4 5.3{tu 3} 5.3.8{tu 3} 5.3.4{tu 3} 5.3.8{tu 3} 5.3.4{tu 3} 5.3.8{tu 3} 5.3.4{tu 3} 5.3.8{tu 3} |

Nobody writes jazz out as in bars 2 and 3: it is unreadable at speed. Jazz charts write plain eighth notes and put the word Swing at the top. The notation in this course does the same, and because the playback engine plays exactly what is written, the captions remind you to swing the eighths wherever it matters.

Feel the triplet before you play the swing

The drill below moves from quarters to triplets to swing eighths and back. The point is to keep the triplet audible in your head while you leave out its middle note. Count "1-trip-let 2-trip-let" aloud in bar 2, then in bar 3 keep counting the same way while playing only on "1" and "let".

\tempo 92
.
\ts 4 4
:4 5.3 5.3 5.3 5.3 | :8 5.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} | :8 5.3{tu 3} -.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} -.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} -.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} -.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} | :4 5.3 5.3 5.3 5.3 |

Practise this with the metronome set to the triplets subdivision at first, then with the subdivision off. When you can turn the subdivision off and your swing eighths still land on the third triplet, you have internalised it.

How swing changes with tempo

The 2:1 ratio is a model, not a law. Listen to any great player and measure their eighth notes and you will find the ratio moves with the tempo:

• Slow tempos (ballads, slow blues, roughly 50–90 bpm): the swing gets harder, closer to 3:1, like a dotted eighth followed by a sixteenth. The space between the beats is so wide that a 2:1 feel sounds lazy.
• Medium tempos (110–180 bpm): close to the triplet model, 2:1. This is the home tempo of swing.
• Fast tempos (220 bpm and up): the eighth notes get straighter, approaching 1:1. There is simply not enough time to place a short note precisely, and even eighths at speed still sound like swing because of the accents (next section).

The following example shows the three ratios written out. Play each bar at the tempo it belongs to and you will hear that each one sounds natural at its own speed and wrong at the others.

\tempo 120
.
\ts 4 4
:8 5.3{d} 5.3.16 5.3.8{d} 5.3.16 5.3.8{d} 5.3.16 5.3.8{d} 5.3.16 | :8 5.3{tu 3} -.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} -.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} -.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} -.3{tu 3} 5.3{tu 3} | :8 5.3 5.3 5.3 5.3 5.3 5.3 5.3 5.3 |

The practical rule: do not decide your swing ratio, hear it. Match the drummer's ride cymbal or the recording you are playing with. When you practise alone, let the metronome's swing 8ths subdivision set it for you, then turn the subdivision off and keep it.

Accenting the upbeat

The second ingredient is accent. Classical phrasing leans on the downbeat. Swing phrasing leans on the upbeat, the "and" of each beat, the short note of the pair. Play a scale with every upbeat slightly louder and every downbeat slightly softer, and even straight eighths begin to sound like jazz. This is also why fast bebop still swings when the ratio is almost 1:1: the accents carry the feel.

\tempo 120
.
\ts 4 4
:8 8.6 10.6{ac} 7.5 8.5{ac} 10.5 7.4{ac} 9.4 10.4{ac} | 10.4 9.4{ac} 7.4 10.5{ac} 8.5 7.5{ac} 10.6 8.6{ac} |

Do not overdo this. The accent is a lean, not a hammer blow. Record yourself: if a listener can hear "AND, AND, AND" as a separate thing, you have gone too far. The goal is a forward lean that makes the line feel like it is pushing towards the next beat.

Articulation: long-short

The third ingredient is note length. In the swing pair the downbeat note is long (it lasts right up to the upbeat) and the upbeat note is short in duration but played legato into the next downbeat. Horn players describe swing eighths with syllables: "doo-dle-doo-dle" or "doo-BAH". Say that aloud at 140 bpm: the "doo" is long and connected, the "BAH" (or "dle") is lighter and quicker and leads into the next "doo". Notes that end a phrase on an upbeat are usually clipped short; notes that end a phrase on a downbeat are usually held.

Put the three ingredients together on a line over a ii–V–I. The line uses only chord tones so that your whole attention can go to the rhythm.

\tempo 132
.
\ts 4 4
:8 5.5{ch "Dm7"} 3.4{ac} 7.4 5.3{ac} 7.4 3.4{ac} 5.5 3.4{ac} | 5.4{ch "G7"} 4.3{ac} 7.3 6.2{ac} 8.2 6.2{ac} 7.3 4.3{ac} | 5.3{ch "Cmaj7"} 5.2{ac} 8.2 7.1{ac} :4 8.1 r |

The comping exercise at the end of this lesson uses standard drop-2 shapes on the middle four strings for the same three chords:

Practising with the click on 2 and 4

A classical metronome clicks on every beat and you play along with it. A jazz metronome clicks only on beats 2 and 4, the beats where the drummer's hi-hat closes and where a swing band's accents live. This does two things:

1. It forces you to generate beats 1 and 3 yourself. The click confirms you were right half a beat later.
2. It makes your time feel lean forward, because you are hearing the backbeat rather than the downbeat.

Set the metronome to 2 and 4 only. To start, count "1, 2, 3, 4" with the clicks on 2 and 4, then begin. The hardest part is the first bar: if the click lands on your 1 and 3 instead, you have turned the beat around. Stop and restart. It will happen often in the first week and almost never after that.

The simplest exercise is to comp the ii–V–I with chord stabs exactly on the clicks, so that chord and click become one sound. Then play the chord-tone line above with the same click.

\tempo 100
.
\ts 4 4
r.4 (5.5 7.4 5.3 6.2).4{ch "Dm7"} r.4 (5.5 7.4 5.3 6.2).4 | r.4 (5.5 5.4 4.3 6.2).4{ch "G7"} r.4 (5.5 5.4 4.3 6.2).4 | r.4 (3.5 5.4 4.3 5.2).4{ch "Cmaj7"} r.4 (3.5 5.4 4.3 5.2).4 | r.4 (3.5 5.4 4.3 5.2).4 r.4 (3.5 5.4 4.3 5.2).4 |

Listening: hear the three ingredients

Swing is learned by ear, not by arithmetic. Spend at least as long listening as playing this week, and listen for one ingredient at a time: first the ratio, then the accents, then the note lengths.

• The Count Basie Orchestra of the late 1930s, with Freddie Green on guitar. Green plays four quarter notes to the bar and hardly ever an eighth note, yet his time is the definition of swing: listen to how the quarters lean towards 2 and 4.
• Charlie Christian with the Benny Goodman Sextet. The first great electric jazz guitarist and still a model for accented, horn-like eighth notes. Note how straight his eighths are at fast tempos and how hard they swing anyway.
• Wes Montgomery, the mid-tempo tracks on his Riverside recordings. Listen to the long-short articulation and to the way his thumb makes every upbeat sing.
• Lester Young with the Basie band, and Dexter Gordon on his 1960s Blue Note records: two saxophonists whose eighth notes sit behind the beat, relaxed in placement but never late in the accents. Guitarists copy horn players for a reason.
• Jim Hall with Sonny Rollins for swing at a whisper, and Grant Green with organ trios for swing that is almost straight and still irresistible.

Pick a mid-tempo track, loop eight bars and play straight eighths on one note along with it. Adjust your ratio until your eighths disappear into the ride cymbal.

Exercises

1. Triplet drill (second example) with the metronome's triplet subdivision at 80, 100 and 120 bpm; then with no subdivision at the same tempos.
2. Scale with upbeat accents at 100–140 bpm, click on 2 and 4, through at least three fingerings of C major and then in F and Bb.
3. Chord-tone line at 120–150 bpm, click on 2 and 4, first with every note picked, then with the upbeats slurred into the downbeats where fingering allows.
4. Three ratios: play bar 1 of the ratio example at 60, bar 2 at 140, bar 3 at 240. Then play each bar at the "wrong" tempo and notice why it sounds wrong.
5. Stabs on 2 and 4 at 60, 100 and 160 bpm. At 60 bpm, aim for ten bars in a row without drifting.

Quiz