220 Par t 5:Embellishing
What’s confusing is that instead of notating swing as it’s actually played (with
triplets), most swing music uses straight eighth notation—which you’re then
expected to translate into the triplet-based swing.
So if you’re presented a swing tune and you see a bunch of straight eighths, you
should play them with a triplet feel instead, like this:In swing, straight eighths are played with a triplet feel.Some arrangers try to approximate the swing feel within a straight rhythm by
using dotted eighth notes followed by sixteenth notes, like this:In swing, dotted eights and sixteenths are played with a triplet feel.Whatever you do, don’t play this precisely as written! Again, you have to trans-
late the notation and play the notes with a triplet feel.
The swing feel is an important one, and you find it all over the place. Swing is
used extensively in jazz music, in traditional blues music, in rock shuffles, and in
all manner of popular music old and new. Learning how to swing takes a bit of
effort; it’s normal to play the stiff dotted-eighth/sixteenth rhythm instead of the
rolling triplets when you’re first starting out. But that effort is worth it—a lot of
great music is based on that swinging feel.Getting the Word
Before we end this chapter, let’s take a look at one other notation challenge:
how to add words to your music.
Notating lyrics is something that all songwriters have to do, and it isn’t that
hard—if you think logically. Naturally, you want to align specific words with
specific notes in the music. More precisely, you want to align specific syllables
with specific notes.
This sometimes requires a bit of creativity on your part. You might need to split
up words into awkward-looking syllables. You also might need to extend sylla-
bles within words where a note is held for an extended period of time. This
requires a lot of hyphens in the lyrics, as you can see in the following example: