The Great Cut-Time Shift
There has been a dramatic shift in American popular music's grooves over the past sixty or so years. To understand it, you need to know what swing is. Here is a piece of music played without swing:
https://youtu.be/Wz_f9B4pPtg?t=10
Here is that same piece of music played with swing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONknTGUckKc
To create swing, all you need to do is alternately lengthen and shorten your beats. In the Tchaikovsky piece above, the eighth notes are "straight," meaning that they are all the same length. In the Ellington arrangement, the first eighth note in each pair is longer, and the second eighth note in each pair is shorter.
The rubbery, sensual feel of swing is one of the core achievements of American music. Here's a more detailed discussion of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3lzbNLxYhQ
Usually we associate swing with jazz, but it is everywhere in American vernacular music: in rock, country, funk, reggae, hip-hop, and many styles of dance music. Swing is a standard feature of notation software, MIDI sequencers, and drum machines. Computer swing is more robotic and less groovy than human swing, but it's a good starting point for understanding.
Noteflight, the fabulously useful browser-based notation editor, allows you to apply swing at either the eighth or sixteenth note level. This is great, because to my knowledge, no other notation program allows you to do that. Sibelius, Finale and the others only swing eighth notes. When digital audio production tools like Ableton Live and Logic Pro apply swing, they do it at the sixteenth-note level by default. Some of them let you swing eighth notes too, but if you want that, you have to specify it. This is because Black American music underwent a significant shift in about 1960: the basic pulse unit changed from eighth notes to sixteenth notes.
Before rock and roll, American popular music mostly drew its rhythms from jazz, so it swung at the eighth note level. Early rock songs continued to use eighth note swing as well. But the pop music from my lifetime draws its beats from funk and R&B, which use sixteenth note swing. To help you hear the difference, here are two Jackson 5 tunes. The first has an eighth-note pulse, and it sounds like the 1950s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-OteAgvINc
This one has a sixteenth note pulse, and it sounds much closer to the present:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3Q80mk7bxE
For a rare piece of music that uses both eighth and sixteenth note swing, listen to Ray Charles' arrangement of "You Are My Sunshine." Most of the track uses funk-style sixteenth note swing, but during the horn break at 1:00, it switches to jazz-style eighth note swing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvMl6MDjdak
No wonder everyone in pop is so confused as to how long a bar is! The implicit pulse is different depending which era you come from. It's especially confusing in rock, which spans multiple eras of black rhythm.
If I had to pick a specific tipping point for The Great Cut-Time Shift, I would choose James Brown's "Cold Sweat." Nelson George identifies it as one of the earliest funk songs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bztE5IbQOo
Before "Cold Sweat," Black music used relatively fast base tempos. After "Cold Sweat," the tempos became slower, and the rhythms were more finely subdivided. Miles Davis' "So What" feels laid back, but it has a base tempo of 135 BPM. By contrast, "Get Ur Freak On" by Missy Elliott feels "faster," but its tempo is only 89 BPM. In more current hip-hop, the base tempo can be as low as 65 or 70 BPM. Meanwhile, the basic pulse is shifting from sixteenth notes to 32nd notes.
When we created the Groove Pizza, we were not sure how we should label the slices of the pizza. We ultimately decided not to specify what beat value each slice represents. You can think of the slices as eighth notes, sixteenth notes, 32nd notes, or whatever you want.
As you adjust the swing parameter, you can see each pair of beats (at whatever resolution) getting alternately wider and narrower.
As with so many developments in popular music, the makers of music notation software have not kept pace with the Great Cut-Time Shift. The Sibelius help forums say that if you want sixteenth note swing, you need to just convert to cut time. This is not helpful.
Many years ago I played in a funk band, and I helped the frontwoman write and arrange the tunes. We worked them out in the computer using loops and samples, and then I made charts and handed them out to the band. The bass player, a much older and more experienced musician than the rest of us, complained that I was writing everything in cut time. I had no idea what he was talking about--I wanted the music to swing, so I wrote it in eighth notes. I did notice that I had to use twice as many measures for the same piece of music in notation as I did in the sequencer, but I chalked that up to my weak notation skills.
I haven't given the cut-time issue much thought because there's so little overlap between my notation-based and DAW-based musical lives. But now that I'm transcribing a lot of hip-hop and funk and rock for the first time, the issue is front and center. No wonder rock and pop musicians hate learning to read and write even basic chord charts. It's confusing to even decide how long a bar even is! The dance world figured out their own solution long ago, which is to sensibly do everything in 8/8 time; thus their "5, 6, 7, 8" countoff. I use "5, 6, 7, 8" with rock musicians a lot, because it clears up the confusion as to whether I mean cut or common time.
So what do you say, notation software makers? Want to give us sixteenth note swing? Or better yet, will you take a page from Ableton and Logic and let us swing whatever note value we want? Or should we just continue to not notate our beats and grooves?
Update: partially in response to my complaints, Noteflight has now added sixteenth note swing! Thanks, Noteflight.