open mind said:
yes a swing adds the human feel to the drums instead of the perfect mechanical timesignature.if u want to make your drums more human dont quantize to hard.
^^ Word...
A computer (chip) keeps perfect time, if you just program a pattern of 16 steps, the computer will be able to keep that PERFECTLY in time. This tends to sound very mechanical if you have a lot fo stuff going on in your 'off' beats. Just imagine watching a band at a show with a drummer who drums like a robot, he hits all his skins and metal at the exact same volume each time, perfectly (and i mean PERFECTLY) timed. Youd never see this, because its quite frankly impossible.
So when people talk about 'swing' its about beats that dont sound like a robot is playing, and more like the meters are playing. And in most software packages there's more than one way to this. For starters you can vary your velocities a bit for each hit, make your off beat bass drums and snares a bit softer, every other hihat or so softer. Then to have the timing sound more natural you can have certain steps in your pattern starts just a tiny bit later or sooner. You can do this manually per step, or in a lot of software you can have the computer setup the pattern according to a template, this is called quantisization. You can also skip all the programming and quantisization and do what someone above mentioned, just hit record and have the computer record the pattern as you play it in on your controller. Of course for this you gotta be able to keep rythm and have that swing yourself, else it wont swing, it'll prolly sting...
Peace...