I’m not sure what all this talk of Brubeck/Desmond is all about. The number of beats per measure have no bearing on whether the 8th notes swing. Which, in Take 5, they do, incidently.
For a good example of 3/4 with swing, listen to Coltrane’s My Favorite Things.
the original ROCKS - I would hardly call it “straight”, unless i misinterpreted your comparison
(that’s what i was disagreeing with)
heard it
don’t like it
ok - maybe PB wasn’t the best example
How about Broadway vs the Opera?
By straight I meant that the 8th notes are square and even. I didn’t mean to imply that the song was in any way tame.
Right now i’m listening to Leslie Gore sing “You Don’t Own Me”
The notes, for the most part, are even and being sung as written - yet I hear a definite swing in her interpretation
Of course it’s nearly impossible to answer - what’s your point? 
Look - to continue with an earlier analogy, sometimes sex is sad, sometimes angry and rough for fun, sometimes angry and rough in a bad way, sometimes romantic, sometimes sexy, etc…and yet people still are constantly trying to find ways to capture the sensation using words.
A swing beat may not be as essential to the human condition as a good shtup, but I still think it is an interesting exercise to try to describe how it feels. YMMV.
Sometimes one leads to the other. 
Eat the goddamn spinach. Eat the goddamn spinach. Eat the goddamn spinach.
whoops. that’s 4:3. 
I guess it’s just one of those things you could agonize over for hours trying to write, or take 15 seconds to demonstrate.
Nowadays they just use quarter note, eighth note, eighth note triplet, sixteenth note, sixteenth note triplet, etc. up to 64th.
Just natural association, however irrelevant:
Interesting. If that is the case for all modern drum machines, what was Marcus Ryle thinking when he programmed the D1 for those odd ratios? Maybe it was just the challenge to be able to.
I’m confused by your posts, Musicat. Swing is most definitely not a perfectly neat subdivision. When a band “swings” everybody is locked into the groove, and that groove is rarely exactly set up as a a quarter, eighth-note triplet. I mean, there really is no music out there (except for electronica) that is played in perfect time. What am I missing here?
Probably to give the machine a “human feel”.
It certainly is. But the only way we will be able to resolve this is to do some detailed time analysis of commercial recordings by the millisecond.
That might be a fun project, but too time-consuming for me at the moment unless someone wants to pay me for the gig.
Either I’m right, or I’ve wasted decades of professional music playing the wrong way, and so far no one has criticized me for being on the wrong beat. (Playing the wrong song, maybe… )
Maybe. I don’t recall if there was a “random variation” function available, which, within very small limits, could add a human touch.
It most certainly is what? A perfect subdivision.
Read a detailed analysis of the swing in jazz drummers here.
Click on the PDF file. Look at the chart documenting average swing. In the way the author has quantified it, 250 is a hard sixteenth-note swing, 333 is triplet feel, 500 is straight eights. The average swing range for the jazz drummers goes from 282 (almost, but not quite, dotted eigths and sixteenths) to 443 (close, but not quite) straight eighths.
This is what musicians mean when they talk about how hard a drummer swings. This is why you have ratios on your drum machines. Swing, especially at faster tempii, tends to gravitate more and more towards a straight-eight feel. But it’s not straight eighths. And it’s not triplets. It’s somewhere in between.
But no matter how hard you swing or not, you’re not going to be on the wrong beat, anyway. The 1-2-3-4 is still there where it belongs. And, whether you know it or not, you’re probably taking your swing cues from the drummer (or vice versa) so you’ll be playing in sync anyway.
I mean, don’t you notice how drummers push and pull the beat? Take John Bonham, for instance. He’s the kind of the bluesy, behind-the-behind style of drumming. His drumming has it’s own swing because he places his snare hits on the back end of the beat. It got a lazy, funky swagger to it.
Then you have somebody on the other end of the spectrum: Stewart Copeland. He’s always pushing the beat, playing on the very front end of it. It’s a completely different feel from Bonham. It’s more frenetic, more jumpy.
Then, you have the king of playing smack dab in the center of the beat: Phil Collins. One drumming magazine did an analysis of popular drummers, and Phil Collins ended up rating the most perfect timekeeper of them all.
The reason I bring this up is that music notation cannot quantify all the variables that go into feel, phrasing, timing, etc. It’s just very crude notation that doesn’t really capture the nuances that separate a Copeland from a Bonham, or a Bill Evans from a Cannonball Adderly. Swing, especially, is one of those extremely personal touches a performer makes. And swing varies widely in feel, and cannot and does not neatly and perfectly fit into sixteenth-note or eighth note subdivisions.
Whoops. I was going back and forth trying to think whether to compare pianists or saxophonists and somehow got one of each. I meant “Bill Evans from a Count Basie” or “John Coltrane from a Cannonball Adderly.”
Amen! Preach it, puly.
Swing is situational; it has to fit into the greater context. It’s not simply a matter of notation or even feel –you don’t even have to have a triplet, 3:2, or whatever feel to swing.
A good illustration of this principle is to listen to really old records. Hear Benny Goodman play Stompin’ at the Savoy in 1936, or Don’t Be That Way in 1938. Then listen to Chick Webb play Stompin’ at the Savoy or Don’t Be That Way in 1934. The first-year jazz studies student in you will be tempted to say “The eighths are too straight. Ergo, this does not swing.” However, the first-year student in you is pigeonholing, listening but not feeling. Swing is momentum, drive, almost a physical force. The Webb band had it. So did the Goodman band, in a different way.
I know, I know. “Chick Who”?
Well, now you’re getting into territory that might be a bit too esoteric for the OP, and an area I alluded to when I said that swing is more likely to lag the beat than anticipate it (just a tiny, nearly imperceptible amount). But I was actually referring to major beats, not minor subdivisions.
But this may be what makes the subtle difference between a jazz performer and a classical one. When I am playing jazz, the thought is “lay back,” just a cool hair late (to the major beat), and I think all good musicians are subconsciously hip to his feeling.
But the division of a major beat into thirds, not fifths, is pretty much where it’s at. Indeed, although I haven’t yet checked your references, the numbers you cite hover around exactly the 3-to-the beat division I am describing. And no, I don’t expect a human being to be as exact as a metronome, but that’s the guiding concept.
No they don’t. Check my reference before you assert it confirms your statement.
Donald Bailey, Elvin Jones, and Steve Gadd all tended more towards a 3:2 ratio rather than a 2:1 ratio.
Here. Lemme break down the information for you, using your drum-machine ratio settings for swing:
Art Blakey: 2.03:1
Art Taylor: 2.55:1
Bernard Purdie: 2.06:1
Buddy Rich: 2.08:1
Donald Bailey: 1.63:1
Ed Thigpen: 1.83:1
Max Roach: 1.75:1
Mickey Roker: 1.92:1
Philly Jo-Jones: 1.92:1
Jack Dejohnett: 1.75:1
Elvin Jones: 1.70:1
Steve Gadd: 1.42:1
Roy Haynes: 1.26:1
William Kennedy: 2.36:1
Tony Williams: 2.17:1
Dave Weckel: 1.99:1
This is exactly why drum machines and sequencers have such odd ratios for their swing settings. Like I said, I never swing any sequenced parts at 2:1–it’s always closer to something like 1.8 or even 1.5:1. For something that should be straight eights, I’ll even typically swing the hi-hat ever so slightly, like 1.1 or 1.2:1 just to give it a little more groove.
Of course, no musician thinks in 5-note subdivisions. You don’t think when you swing. You just swing. Of course you can say the basic pulse is either duple or triple meter for swing, but that doesn’t accurately convey the sorts of ratios we’re talking about. As you can see from my numbers, average swing for these drummers seems to hover somewhere between 3:2 (1.5:1) and 2:1.
And here’s yet another study. First hit off google search for “Swing ratio”.
(Emphasis added).
You can even find examples of different swing ratios on that link.