Controlling Rhythm

Groove lives in accents and micro-timing; a quantised grid flattens it into a ruler.

Related

SyncopationTempoMIDI Protocol

The problem

Ask for groove, or a touch of swing, and the result is either stiff or loose in the wrong way. Rhythm is the dimension a model satisfies most easily and a grid destroys most thoroughly, because nothing sounds wrong, only unstyled. The model is not ignorant of rhythm; the description simply has no landing point.

How it works

Groove is built from three things. Accent placement, where sixteenths group into strong and weak positions. Small differences in note length, which decide whether the feel is relaxed or tense. Offsets against the beat, since a soul drummer places the snare slightly late. Ragtime syncopation only works when the bass stays steady underneath. Quantisation pulls every note onto the grid, erases those differences and takes the style with them. Swap the sound library on the same MIDI and the judgement of groove changes at once, because attack speed and tail length rewrite the accents.

Practice

Write the skeleton first, marking which positions in each bar must sound and which may only be brushed. State swing as a percentage, where sixty to seventy percent is usually enough. For human feel, move a few notes by hand after quantising, the snare a few milliseconds late and the hi-hat a few early, and move only the strikes rather than randomising a whole track. Do not force a compound metre into 4/4; name the time signature and the grouping instead. With a reference kit, align reference and result to the same bar and compare placement instrument by instrument rather than looping the whole thing. Keep one version to continue from instead of switching back and forth, and write the humanising values down, otherwise every session starts by guessing again.

What to listen for

On the funk kit, whether sixteenth accents and ghost notes take shape; on the soul kit, whether the snare sits behind the beat; in the jig, the lilt of compound time; in the rag, how the syncopated melody rides a steady bass. The marks of the grid are audible in all four.

Sources

• 律动的构成要素，依流行音乐制作通识核对，未抄文本
• 量化与人性化的取舍，依编曲实践归纳，未抄原文

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.