- Hi.
In this film I just want
to clear up a little topic
that causes a bit of bother for some folk
and if you're a jazzer this
won't be a problem at all
because you'll have been dealing
with swing rhythm all of your life.
But sometimes music is
written in this sort of way
with what we call straight quavers,
but there's an instruction
that's something
about dealing with swing rhythm
and it's often this instruction.
You see at the beginning that it will say
pair of quavers like this,
and then it will say equals,
and then you'll see a
crotchet and a quaver
with a triplet sign.
And that's the clue to how
to deal with swing rhythm
because some people when
they see a piece like this
even though it's got this
instruction at the beginning
they'll play it with
straight quavers like this.
One, two, three, four
one, two, three, four.
And it sounds all right
and it actually even sounds
a little bit jazzy because
you've got this tied note here
and this tied note here,
but all those quavers that
I am playing at the moment
are straight quavers.
I'm going one and two
and three, four,
one and two and three, four.
But have a look at this
instruction for a moment
because what this is
asking me to do is to look
at each pair of quavers and to play them
as a triplet, so I'm going
one, two, three, one, two, three, baa.
One, two, three, one, two, three.
Do you see how you kind of
calculate that in triplets.
So if I play this again,
but this time with swing rhythm
this is how it sounds.
One, two, three, four.
So did you see what I've done?
I've changed each pair of
quavers into this rhythm
so we get a swing rhythm.
Now that's not the same
as a dotted rhythm.
So a swing rhythm is not
turning a pair of quavers
into this rhythm because
that's a bit too tight.
If I do that and I dot the notes.
That's a bit too severe
for a swing rhythm.
So we've got to have this
slightly more kind of gentle
three division not a
four, because that's going
one, two, three, four
and we've got to go one, two, three.
You see it's just a slightly
gentler rhythm isn't it?
And by the way, this is
not really swung rhythm.
Lots of people talk about
this as a swung rhythm,
it's a swing rhythm.
That's the correct term for it,
but if you ever come
across a piece of music
that's written with straight quavers
and is directed to be
played as a swing piece
or you have this
direction at the beginning
that's how you should deal with it.
So I hope that makes a little
bit of sense of swing rhythm.
Have fun with it.
