Groove/No groove?

Cooked Food

What d'yall think about the kind of rhythms people are putting out these days? I hear a lot of straight 16th-no-swing type beats. Is this just cos producers are lazy? Is this a bad direction for the music to take or do you like the more 'electro' type sound?

Food

Sen

To quote some famous Jazz guy who goes by the moniker of Satchmo...

"It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing"

Garage without swing, to me anyway, is like a steak and kidney pie without the steak.

You may as well be listening to house or breaks, depending on your prefered subgenre.

DJ Fat Zed

I'm a bit off on this one. I don't like the way a musical genre can be based upon a computer quantize setting. I like straight beats, but I also like more natural beats and electronically swung beats. I think that the best results come from combining all of them so that they bounce off each other a little.

Sen

but Zed, the shuffle is an element that sets UKG apart from the other genres...it's just one of many, but IMO, it's one of the more important ones.

It gives it that "feel" that attracted me to the sound in the first place, you know?

That's what quantization/groove etc. is all about really giving different feelings/expression to the same grid of drum patterns.

You lock a 2step beat to a 16 quantization hard and you may wonder where the feeling's gone...similarly, take the same beat and tripletize it and BAM! you're grooving to it (if you like that feel)

The differences are subtle but your brain will know it's there...

That said, a little bit of straight ahead beats may fit different songs etc.

I guess in the end, use your ears, not some present groove template. If it sounds good straight, leave it...if it doesn't try to swing it.

tiger

i like swinging 4/4

no one seems to be doing this anymore

Cooked Food

I don't believe in putting constraints on people's creativity - just because you're not supposed to do it don't mean you can't do it. There are no rules. A really funky groove can carry a whole tune so for me that's always the starting point - and I never use groove templates.

Just recently I've been moving away from 2-step beats to experiment with freaky beats a bit more: ragga type beats (are people calling this three-step btw?) I've also messed around trying to give 2-step beats a more techno feel - just a bit of shuffle here and there and I quite like the sound I get.

It takes more skill and work to make a groovy beat are people just being lazy or is this the sound of the future? I think the funk will prevail meeself.

Food