What groove is
It is not only the pattern but how it is played: tiny timing deviations, dynamics, the length and envelope of the sounds. Two drummers on the same pattern produce different grooves.
Swing
The duration ratio between the two halves of a beat.
- 50%: straight eighth notes.
- About 66%: triplet swing (long–short 2:1).
- The swing functions of DAWs and drum machines work in percentages (MPC style typically between 50% and 75%).
Sixteenth notes can also be swung: this is the basis of boom bap hip hop, UK garage, neo-soul.
Microtiming
- Laid-back: snare or voice late by a few milliseconds (5–20 ms): a relaxed, “heavy” feel.
- Push: hi-hat or bass early: urgency.
- Bass behind the kick: creates a soft wave.
- Calculation: at 90 BPM a beat lasts 666.7 ms, a sixteenth note 166.7 ms; a 10 ms delay is about 6% of a sixteenth note, hard to measure but very audible.
DAW techniques
- Partial quantization (50–80%) instead of full.
- Groove templates extracted from a played loop and applied to other tracks.
- Ghost notes at low velocity on the snare.
- Velocity variations on the hi-hats (accents on the offbeats or the downbeats).
- Manual shifting of individual hits.
Example in A minor
Beat at 88 BPM: quantized kick, snare +12 ms, hi-hat with 58% swing on the sixteenth notes, bass Am – Dm played by hand slightly behind the kick: the loop stops sounding “grid-locked.”
Real-world example
J Dilla's album “Donuts” (2006) is the reference for unquantized feel in hip hop; D'Angelo's “Voodoo” (2000) brings the same systematic lag to a live band.