TO SWING OR NOT TO SWING?
Beyond the sheet music
In other articles a single melody note was added on top of a steady, even bass solo to create the world’s simplest fingerstyle pattern. You can find too, how to write a simple song, basod on that idea.
What goes beyond the sheet music is that you can further colouring your playing by shifting some of the melody note in time back or forth. Taking our beloved ‘Pattern’ we can put our ‘inserted eighth note’ anywhere between the third and fourth quarter notes of the bar. The character of the music will be determined precisely by the distance between the quarter note preceding the melody note and the melody note.
Let’s narrow down the infinite number of possibilities to five meaningful cases:
What we can neglect...
They all have musical validity, but applied in a repetitive pattern, the first two… well, try it. Excellent finger exercise, but tiresome to listen to in the long run. It’s a bit fanfare-y.
The three “usable” versions are written out for a fingerstyle pattern:
...and what to use?
Just straight ahed
To start with, I recommend version 3. It’s exactly predictable and easy to practice on a metronome.
Shuffle-feel
The “shuffle-feel” or “swing-feel” is the fourth example. The most accurate description is in triplets, which is a perfectly good starting point. 1-2-3 1-2-3, 1-x-3, 1-x-3… You can also metronome it.
You’ll never see it written down like this, though, because it’s hard to write. It’s much easier to write eighths and put “Swing” or “Shuffle feel” with a little diagram.
Additional important point is that if you play exactly to the sheet music you will get a waltz sooner than a swing. Especially if you have European musical roots with a strong tendency to emphasize the first note of the beat. But at best, the effect will be mechanical. That’s when the audience hums, “yeah, it’s accurate, but lifeless…”
There’s a reason it’s called shuffle-feel: the melodic tone can be anywhere between the eighth (3) and the “stretched eighth” (5), and is entirely individual. Play with it, experiment, find your place between the two quarters.
The other shore
The last option is the “eighteenth/sixteenth” (5). This is a more bouncy, edgy, European feel, exemplified in Dvorak’s Humoresque No.7 (Op.101) and also seen in Django Reinhard.
It's nice, but
when, which one?
Which version to choose, or whether to deviate at all from the sequence of eighth notes in the score – this, in many cases, is not optional. In a classical piece, it can go well, but it can also be stylistically inappropriate. Just as a blues-ragtime song played purely in eighth notes is a first-rate way to induce a derailing feeling.
Listen to lots of different kinds of music, listen to how old blues guitarists, classical musicians, rock musicians, anyone, use it. A very good reference is Rick Beato’s interview where Joscho Stephan illustrates the different approaches.
And again: experiment! Everyone can put their own unique sound between the two quarters…