swing loosens the beat up, moves it off the grid to sound a little less programmed and a little more humanized. it helps make your beats groove some more. its not great for all types of music… its rarely used in techno for instance, but pretty much every house song uses it. it starts a 50% because the first beat of each 16th note pair takes up 50% of the time (convention started by Linn).
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Perhaps this read is helpful, some examples with audio in here too:
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It also depends on what your bpm is. At 80 bpm you will hear the swing a lot, on 160 you will hear it but it won’t sound as groovy, more like glitchy, dragging or even off.
A standard 4 to the floor beat with some 16th notes hihats at around 120 bpm with something like 59% swing will give you that groovy house feeling.
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I’m not an expert in house, jazz or genre staples reliant on it, but just try using it it at extremes and more subtly, as mentioned earlier check out Beat Dissected - Attack Magazine for classic form and convention, and you can use it with intention!
It’s not a scenario where 0 = boring and 100 = gooderer, it’s the interplay between percussion and other tracks which may have differing swing values, AND altering ADSR or note lengths in the tracks being swung and other tracks.
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On OT/A4/AR you can use swing on any step (per track on OT). Can be used as delay if you select all trigs. Possible to add swing to a different signature pattern (twice slower iirc).
You can record silence before the sound and modify Start. Doesn’t need duplicates.
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Without a decent theory background I basically try to visualize swing in the context of the all-groove, it needs to fill into a space created for the interplay of every other percussive or melodic rhythm, back and forth, call and response, shove and pull, breathe and exhale.
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Triplets exact value is 80 in that case. (66 for even 16th).
Are you sure that´s described in the midi specification? I can´t find anything like that in there and it does not make much sense to me either given that most modern midi sequencers meassure incoming midi clock messages, average it (that´s why you can see the tempo go up and down a bit on displays sometimes) and adjust their own clock to it.
Of course swing over midi won´t work with a sequencer that adjusts its own clock - or does the ERM Multiclock use some kind of midi trickery to achieve swing?
No it’s not in the spec, it’s just an obvious, simple and reliable way to implement it (did it myself in homemade sequencers, works damn fine), and one I found in a lot of sequencers and drum machines. In fact I don’t see much advantage in the method you described, but if it’s what modern stuff do… then so be it… in which case the multiclock can’t do anything to it either.