I think you’re thinking of swing more than shuffle. But what you say is true. (And you can think of a shuffle as a “hard swing” I suppose.) Yes, when you “swing” eighths, the convention is usually to notate it at the top of the music as two connected eighth notes equals a triplet consisting of a quarter note and eighth not. (If that’s not clear, look at the notation here).
Now, I hear the underlying subdivision of beats as 3s, so 12/8 works for me, but 4/4 is more familiar and usual. And if you don’t have a lot of triplet patterns, much easier to work with, in my opinion.
Anyhow, the literature I’ve seen about swing is pretty interesting. The amount of swing varies depending on what instrument is playing and the tempo of the piece. So the sax and drums in a band, while the main beats will line up for them, the subdivision of the swung eighths may differ. What I clearly remember is the faster the tempo, the more swing approaches a 50:50 (in other words, unswung) time division of eighth notes. The slower the tempo, and we start getting into shuffle territory, with swing approaching 75:25 or more.
6/8 is also a traditional time signature for piping tunes. My pipe major laments that modern piping teachers and pipe majors tend to re-frame the old 6/8s into 3/4s to make them easier to teach and play, at the sacrifice of the traditional feel of the rhythm.
I’ve seen a piece of music that used 4/4, notated the triplets at first, but then dropped them off, using the sim. as if the triplet markings were just style/tempo/dynamic markings.
That was probably just a way for the copyist or engraver to avoid some work, much like we used to dispense with key sigs and clefs after the first line on a page unless they changed. With computers doing the work now, abbreviations like that aren’t used as much. One problem with using abbrevs. is if you start reading the piece in the middle, you have to back up first to see what’s going on.
I’ve seen this several times. As Musicat notes, it is weird when leafing through the music, catching the middle of the music where the convention is employed and wondering just how in the hell three eighth notes fit into a quarter.
Does anybody know what time signature Gil Evans’ There Comes a Time was in? I once sat around with a group of musicians (several of which were drummers) trying to figure it out. I think our best guess was 37/16 or something crazy like that.
I should actually correct this–it seems I’m incorrect. “Shuffle” and “swing” can be used synonymously for that rhythm. I’m not sure where I picked it up, but somewhere along the line I’ve associated the dotted eighth-and-sixteenth rhythm with shuffle, and the approximate triplet rhythm with swing. I’ve noticed that someone else also makes this distinction on another message board, and here, too, so I guess I’m not the only one who uses the words in this way.
However, looking around the greater web, it seems that most people use shuffle for the triplet feel swing, too.
Ah. You see, I always look at the first measure, since that’s where the time signature is. And I do a quick scan through the music to make sure it hasn’t changed.
And while I took music theory, most of this stuff is stuff I picked up just by reading the music. Theory is where I learned chord structure and stuff.
That’s fine, but the time signature is not going to help you with this particular notation. The time signature stays 4/4, it’s just the triplet bracketing stops after a few measures, with the notation “sim.” or something to that effect. So you have the notional 4/4 time signature, it’s just your triplets are no longer indicated as such.
