> Step by step

1. Dialling in swing in Logic Pro and Ableton Live

1 Different DAWs have their own ways of introducing swing to a drum track. Logic, for instance, relies on a slider found within the Local Inspector pane of the Piano Roll editor beneath the Quantize field. To see how it works, let’s check out this drum pattern, which contains kick, sidestick and percussion hits – all quantised to straight 16th-notes.

2 Now let’s slide the Swing control up from 0 to its maximum of 100 and hear the difference. Hang on – there’s no difference! Why not? Well, it’s because our pattern contains notes that only fall on eighth-note beats. For the swing feature to work, we need to have some notes fall on the bar’s even-numbered 16th notes (the ones between the eighths).

3 So let’s pop in a few extra beats and see where that gets us. With the Swing slider back at 0 for now, we’ve added percussion hits on 16th-note numbers 2, 8, 10 and 16. This already fills out our beat and gives it a much skippier feel, but the Time Quantize is still straight 16ths with 0 swing.

4 If we increase the Swing control to 100, we can see that these extra beats have now shifted to the right – ie, later in relation to the grid. This is confirmed by watching the note position values in the rightmost List editor move as we adjust the Swing slider back and forth. Now we’ve got a skippy, UK garage-style sound.

5 Ableton Live does things slightly differently, in that you have to choose a groove to apply first, then select the degree to which you apply it to the selected clip. Start by clicking the Hot Swap button in the Clip view – this will reveal the Groove Pool, a palette of available groove templates.

6 Find a groove you like the sound of, then double-click it to apply it to the clip. You can then adjust the degree of swing by adjusting the orange Global Amount slider below the Groove Pool window. Unlike Logic, Live doesn’t physically move the notes’ position until you click the Commit button.