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→Swing-Feel
=== Swing-Feel ===
Sometimes to make simple rhythms a little more interesting, musicians employ a ''swing feel''. Basically, it takes two notes of equal duration and makes the first one a little longer and the second one shorter. So The most typical rhythm uses a triplet, which we will cover [[Applying Rhythm to Chords|later]]. However, a swing feel does not have to be strict. For now, consider a swing feel as though two quarter notes sound more like a dotted quarter note and an eighth note. This creates an accented downbeat with a leading upbeat rhythm.
There are no strict rules to a swing feel. You may choose places where you abandon the feel and play strict time. You may overemphasize or underemphasize the swing feel by making the first note far longer than written or just a touch longer.
1 2 3 4
Figure 4 demonstrates visually how a swing feel impacts timing. Strict time plays directly on the beat, while swing time delays every other note a bit. Swing feel 3 is the dotted quarter/eighth note feel, while which really emphasizes the swing 1 . Feel 2 is the triplet approach - dividing the beat into 3rds and playing on the 1st and 3rd divisions. Feel 2 fall falls somewhere in between this and strict timeand would actually be a bit difficult to notate.
Similarly, sometimes musicians play ahead or behind the beat(even on the 1 and 3 beat, not just the 2 and 4). This means they are technically off-time, but if done very subtly, it sounds musical instead of sounding like a mistake.
=== Bass/Strum ===