Swing Question

I don't fully understand how swing works. Say I have a 4-bar loop. I have kicks on the 1 on each bar. I put swing on my kicks at setting 60, -10 so now my kicks are a little lazy. But now my kick on the 1 of the first bar has disappeared. I guess because it went back behind the first 1? Now it's gone? How do I get around this?

In addition, does anyone have any general tips on how they use swing? I'm most interested in getting Dilla-esque drunken lazy swing. Usually I just accomplish this by zooming in on unquantized drums and scooting them around, but I would really like to learn how to master using swing settings. Any tips would be much appreciated. Thanks!

You got it right in your text. The MPC was moving that note behind the first note and so when your sequence started it would miss that note completely. You just have to move that back manually and you're good to go or if you want you could use the 'shift timing' function and move your notes forwards or backwards by a certain amount to avoid that.

Regarding that drunken J Dilla swing? No quantiza can give you that. That's some manual moving around and shifting notes into strange places.

Thanks for the reply, but part of my issue is that i want that kick on the 1 of the first bar to now hit where i slid it. Yes i could slide it back forward to the quantized 1 as you suggested, but that makes it now stick out because it's the only kick that's quantized. That or having it dissapear are my only options?

You can try it the other way...instead of swinging the kick, try shift timing the hats and snare!!

Apply the TC just to a selection of kicks(all but the first)
When you select a range of midi notes and press F1 the TC window pops up and it sais "selected" instead of "all" and only applies the correction to the selected events.

also its important to have an ear for how the drums should knock to the rhythm of the sample/melody...

sometimes i find a break that suits a 57% swing.....others it sounds fowl to use anything more than 53%.....sometimes none....

sometimes swing on the hats and nothing else.....

theres no rules....its what sounds good....

leave it where it is, when it gets to the end of the loop the kick plays, it just wont play when you start your loop.
Make plenty of beats like this, dont let not hearing the kick bug you out when you start the loop

Edit: so when you move them -10, your first kick is now sitting at 04.4.85 or whatever.