Every drum machine has a swing control, and almost nobody explains it. You turn it, the beat gets “bouncier”, and at some point it falls apart. This guide explains what the number means, which hits it moves, how much to use for each style, and how to train your ear to hear it. All the settings below can be tried in the free online drum machine; the knob is called SWING, at the top right of the machine.
Take a bar of 16th notes. Count it “1 e & a, 2 e & a, 3 e & a, 4 e & a”. The numbers and the “&” are the on-beats (the 8th-note grid). The “e” and “a” are the off-beats, the 16ths in between.
Swing delays only the off-beats. The 1, the &, the 2, the & stay exactly where they are. Every “e” and every “a” gets pushed a little late. That is the whole trick: the downbeats keep the time solid, the in-between notes lean back, and the beat starts to lope instead of marching.
| 1 | e | & | a | 2 | e | & | a | 3 | e | & | a | 4 | e | & | a | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stays put | ■ | ■ | ■ | ■ | ■ | ■ | ■ | ■ | ||||||||
| Delayed by swing | → | → | → | → | → | → | → | → |
This means a kick on the 1 and a snare on the 2 and 4 never swing. What swings is everything you put on the “e” and “a”: hi-hats, ghost notes, the kick on the “a of 2” in a boom bap pattern, the syncopated sample chop. If your pattern only has on-beat hits, the swing knob does nothing audible, and that is normal.
The number describes how late the off-beat lands, as a share of the pair of 16ths it belongs to. This is the MPC convention, and the one Shuffle Drummer uses:
| Swing | Where the off-beat lands | How it feels |
|---|---|---|
| 50% | Exactly halfway: straight 16ths | Machine-like, house, techno, trap hi-hats |
| 54–57% | Slightly late | Subtle, “human”, most pop and R&B programming |
| 58–62% | Clearly late, not yet a triplet | The hip-hop and boom bap zone, neo-soul, lo-fi |
| 66–67% | Two thirds of the way: a true triplet | Shuffle, swing jazz, blues, some UK garage |
| 70–75% | Later than a triplet | Drunk, lurching, Dilla-style extremes, use with care |
So a “triplet feel” and a “swing feel” are the same mechanism at different amounts. At 66% the off-beat sits on the third triplet, which is what a jazz drummer plays on the ride. Hip-hop rarely goes that far: 58% to 62% gives the head-nod without turning the beat into a shuffle. The SWING knob in Shuffle Drummer runs from 50% to 75%, which covers every one of these zones.
Swing is defined relative to a grid. On a 1/16 grid, it moves the “e” and “a”. On a 1/8 grid, the pairs are the on-beat and the “&”, so the “&” gets delayed instead. That is why 8th-note swing (the classic shuffle, half-time feels) sounds much heavier at the same percentage: the delayed note is twice as far from its neighbour. For hip-hop, keep the grid at 1/16 and the swing between 56% and 64%. For a blues shuffle, go to 1/8 and 66%.
Shuffle Drummer also has true triplet grids (1/8T and 1/16T). Those are not swing: the cells themselves are triplets, so every note sits on a triplet subdivision. Use them when the whole pattern is a triplet pattern, for example a 6/8 feel or a trap hi-hat roll, and use the swing knob when you want a straight pattern that leans.
Listen to a real drummer: the hi-hat swings the most, the snare backbeat barely moves, the kick sits in between. If you apply the same delay to everything, the kick on the “a” drags too far and the groove gets mushy. In Shuffle Drummer the hi-hat, open hat, cymbal and ride tracks receive half the swing amount of the kick and snare, which keeps the hats busy but tight while the kick leans. If you want to go further, the TIMING mode lets you push or drag any single hit at tick resolution, independent of the swing knob.
Once you hear the pairing at 58%, you will hear it everywhere: in Questlove's hats, in a Dilla beat, in a Timbaland bounce. The numbers stop mattering after that; you turn the knob until it feels right.
Humanize or random timing adds small random offsets to every hit. It makes a beat sloppier, not groovier. Swing is a systematic delay on a specific set of notes, and it repeats identically every bar, which is exactly why the body can lock onto it. If a beat feels stiff, reach for swing, ghost notes and velocity first. Reach for off-grid nudges (TIMING in Shuffle Drummer) for two or three deliberate hits, never for everything.