Developing Swing Feel

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One of the most common questions I am asked by students in private lessons or clinics, is "How do I swing harder?" Developing a strong swing feel may come easy to some players, but for the rest of us we have to consciously practice our feel everyday to make sure we can swing as hard as our favorite players. In the same way that there are proven ways to practice to develop our harmonic vocabulary, we can also practice exercises in our daily routine that will help us to further develop our swing feel.

Using a Metronome

Though metronome's do not technically "swing" on their own, they can be a great tool when working on developing our swing feel as both a soloist and comper. There are three ways in which we can use a metronome when practicing time and feel.

Set the metronome to click on all four beats of the bar. Then practice playing a lick, scale or comp through a tune we are working on while accenting the second and fourth beats of the bar. This will help us get used to feeling the pulse of the bar on these two beats, which can often pose a challenge for inexperienced jazzers.

Once we can comp and/or play single lines while accenting beats two and four, take off the "training wheels" and set the metronome to click on only beats two and four. This may take a while to get used to as most non-jazz genres of music accent beats one and three.

Try and count along with the metronome for a few bars before diving in with whatever exercise we may be working on. Counting along with the metronome will also help you get back on track if we "flip the beat", which means that we started on beats two and four but "flipped" that over to beats one and three.

If we find it easy to play along with the first two steps and are starting to internalize the accents on beats two and four, then we can try placing the metronome on the fourth beat of every bar. This is quite tricky so again, try counting along with the metronome without your instrument until we can feel the fourth beat, rather than count it.

Once we can feel the fourth beat on your own, try jamming along to a favorite standard or playing through an exercise we are working on with the metronome only on the fourth beat. Again, count along with the metronome at first to make sure we can correct ourselves if we flip the beat.

Play-Along Recordings

While there is no replacement for jamming along with a live band, play-along CD's and Mp3's can act as a great substitute in our practice routine. The Jamey Aebersold play-along series has over a hundred volumes with a dozen or so songs on each CD/book. The musicians on these play-along recordings are some of the best, and hardest swinging, jazz musicians in the world.

There is nothing better for our swing feel than jamming along to a rhythm section that features Ron Carter on bass or Joey DeFrancesco on Organ. We can also turn off the piano or bass on each recording by panning to the left or right speaker on your CD player or computer. This can further develop our swing feel as you can take the place of the piano or bass on any of our favorite tunes.

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Comments

+1 # Charles W - T Consaul 2009-04-06 00:02

Jazz is the conflict between the walking of your feet, and the beating of your heart. Your feet move along at a steady one two three four, but your heart pulls a long first beat as it pulls the blood from the extremities. That long slow beat is followed by an explosive, short, second beat where it sends the oxygenated blood back out to the parts of the body that need it. This is notated by a triplet with the first two eighth notes tied together, and the third note accented. The faster the tempo, the less pronounced this effect is, and the slower the tempo, the more pronounced the effect.

In reality, the swing feel is just a shortcut for a quarter note followed by an accented eighth in 6/8 time. Most people don't want to be bothered with writing the chart out in 6/8 in the first place and reading that many tied triplet figures in 4/4 can be a lot harder to scan than quarter notes and eighth notes. Dutch Perry, an old First Sergeant of mine, described the phonetics for swing as five simple syllables. Doo, Dot, Dit, Oo-Vah, and Oo-Vah-Bah. The beginning of any phrase starts with Doo. If the phrase continues, it is followed by Ohh and Vah. Triplets are Ooo-Va-Ba, and the last note of any phrase is dot. (If it is staccato, it is dit) I believe this method comes from his Alma Mater, the Berklee School of Music, but he never specified. The description is my own, and has been an excellent tool in describing the swing feel to my students. If you combine that with the phonetics, it should be relatively simple to get all of your students on the same page in a short period of time. Hope this helps.

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+1 # Matthew Warnock 2009-04-08 15:07

That's another great way to think of swing feel, the phonetics. The only problem I've found with that in the past is that a lot of method books don't really describe it very well and it ends up being more confusing than helpful.

Your teacher should have written a book, it sounds like he had a good system going and it would have made a good addition to the jazz pedagogy library!

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0 # Charles W - T Consaul 2009-04-25 14:27

http://www.dutchperry.com/services/music/music.htm

Actually, James Thomas (Dutch) Perry wrote three books, but he wrote them for the U.S. Government, under the auspices of the Army Element of the School of Music in Little Creek. (The Navy, Army, and Marines send their musicians to this school. The Air Force does on the job training) I still have copies of the originals, as well as a couple of the modifications made later on. He's a fascinating guy and I appreciate the opportunity to look him up again.

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0 # Robert Walker 2009-04-21 05:19

Try out my newly released Bounce Metronome Pro - it lets you play swing rhythms on a metronome! Also the "gravity bounce" visuals help you to keep in time with the ticks.

http://www.bouncemetronome.com

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With Bounce Metronome you can play anything from a steady metronome tick to the most elaborate rhythms. That includes rhythms with swing, dance rhythms, syncopated rhythms, and polyrhythms (cross rhythms), even alternating bars or a cycle of rhythms one after another.

It's extremely user friendly. To get started, you just click one of the preset buttons for the rhythm you want to play, and adjust the tempo with the handy dial.

"You can use it with the sound switched off, as a silent metronome."

The innovative gravity bounce helps you to anticipate the beat and play exactly in time with it. This is especially useful when you are learning a rhythm with irregular beat patterns.

"It's like having your own personal conductor for your practice session"

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-1 # Robert Walker 2009-04-21 05:21

Sorry, here is the url for Bounce Metronome Pro as a proper link you can click on:

www.bouncemetronome.com

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0 # Robert Walker 2009-08-06 07:41

Bounce Metronome Pro now has a separate metronome dedicated to swing - read about it here:
www.bouncemetronome.com/metronome_swing.htm

Use this metronome to practice swing, e.g. for Jazz rhythms, Scottish folk music etc.. You can also use it to add a lilt for a more lively rhythm. The innovative bouncing ball visuals (following path of ball bouncing under gravity) help to improve sensitivity to irregular rhythms such as swing.

Developing Swing Feel

Using a Metronome

Play-Along Recordings

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