How to use the swing and other swing behavior

If you' managed to find the swing feature on the MPC you may wonder what it does, how to use it and may have noted some strange behavior. I will attempt to cover it here.

What it does:

The swing feature only works when TC is set to 1/8 or 1/16 and it shifts the even number of notes later a certain amount. The amount of shift is determined in the AMOUNT: field (of course!). The amount is actually a ratio of the between divided between the two adjacent notes. The normal is 50% and this means that the amount of time is equally split in either side of the even note. As you raise the amount, more percentage of the time is moved from after the even note and place before it. For example, if set to 66%, that means that 66% of the time between the two adjacent notes (the two odd numbered notes) is shifted before the note. Or in other words, the even numbered "swung note" occurs later in time relative to the odd numbered notes.

How do I use it?

It can be use in two ways. One is to originally enter the notes under "no swing" (50%), and then apply swing to the notes you desire. Two things to remember. Be sure to on the track that contains the note you want to swing. This is easy to do if you have only a single note number/pad you want to apply it to or you only have a single note in that particular track. This is because you can only apply swing "after the fact" only on one note number at a time (not individual notes but rather a note number, say note 36/Pad A2). The other method is define how much swing you want to use before entering a series of notes. This way, once you set the amount of swing, this actually changes the amount of time each step moves fro every step you advance. This sort of alters the amount of TC value for every other step. The MPC will continue to advance in this swing pattern until you change the Swing to another value to set it to 50%.

What to watch out for:

Setting the amount to anything other than 50% alters every subsequent step entry movement, even if you switch tracks. So if you've applied it and don't need it anymore, be sure to set it back to 50%. In other words, changing the swing amount immediately changes how TC behaves, and selecting apply only affects the particular note number.