Swing Ratios

Swing ratios are commonly used in music notation programs to emulate swing feel. Expressed as a percentage, the ratio refers1 to consecutive eighth (or sixteenth) notes performed as long-short patterns. Microtiming2 studies have shown that these ratios vary widely depending on style, tempo, musicians’ affinities, and cultural background.

In a fascinating article3 on the impact hip-hop producer J Dilla had on live drum kit performance and pedagogy, Daniel Stadnicki analyzes “how the so-called ‘Dilla-feel’ is emulated by drummers and rhythm section players through a range of informal learning strategies and extended techniques, which include practices of online teaching and learning.”

J Dilla used4 the Akai MPC music workstation, which offers sampling and sequencing capabilities. Swing ratios can be set as a percentage. In DAWs, different names are used—for example, grooves in Ableton, groove quantize presets in Cubase, or groove templates in Logic. Another way to express this swing ratio is by using tuplet notation. This approach certainly doesn’t do justice to the different shades of microtiming, but it has the merit of offering a clear approach to these types of grooves.

The cowbell from the Afro-Peruvian Festejo rhythm is an example of an original swing feel between binary and ternary time:

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Festejo with cajita, quijada, congas, bongo, and cajon:

Feel the Swing

I took inspiration for the next exercise from a 16-year-old beginner student who, while working on shuffle songs, asked me why the groove of some hip-hop tunes felt5 so different from, for example, blues shuffle songs. In the next example, the drum groove over the first 2 bars is straight, which corresponds to a 50% swing ratio or no swing at all; the two notes on the hi-hat have the same length. The swing feel on the hi-hat in bars 4 and 5 equals a 66.6% swing ratio, or a perfect triplet division, with the first note taking up 2/3 of the beat division and the second 1/3. A 60% swing ratio would correspond to 3 and 2 quintuplets (bars 5 and 6). A septuplet division (5 and 3 septuplets) yields approximately a 57% swing ratio.

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Guess the Ratio

When randomizing this example with two-bar fragments, different exercises are conceivable for beginner to intermediate students:

  • try to identify whether a change happens (a two-bar sequence might be played twice or more; 25% chance setting)
  • identify the ratio
  • play along with only quarter notes
  • try to emulate the feeling by adapting your bass line to the drum groove


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  1. Friberg, A., & Sundström, A. (2002). Swing Ratios and Ensemble Timing in Jazz Performance: Evidence for a Common Rhythmic Pattern. Music Perception, 19, 333–349. ↩︎

  2. Collier, G. L., & Collier, J. L. (1996). Microrhythms in jazz: A Review of Papers. Annual Review of Jazz Studies, 8, 463–483. ↩︎

  3. Stadnicki, D. A. (2017). Play like Jay: Pedagogies of drum kit performance after J Dilla. Journal of Popular Music Education, 1, 253–280. ↩︎

  4. Cf., e.g., Rose Ludlow’s post: The Dilla feel, part iii, The grooves (real-world examples and Dilla’s influence) for examples rebuilt in Ableton. ↩︎

  5. He referred to “I Can’t Write Left-Handed” (Bill Withers) as performed by The Roots and John Legend, which to my ears sounds like a 60% swing ratio. ↩︎