I hadn't come across this yet, so I just checked in out in 2XL. It's pretty awesome for something I hadn't seen before! Though I don't know if it's what the OP is after.
I might be getting this wrong so anyone feel free to correct me, but here's how I see it working with realtime swing in a very simple example:
I have a pattern that's purely a closed hi-hat on 16ths at 50% swing, standard issue rigid drum machine backing material. I go into grid edit and then into pattern mode. Pattern mode lays patterns over your tracks which you can use to either build a track from scratch or tweak a track you've made. A few test patterns are built in and there's room to save your own.
Okay, so hats on 16ths, chk chk chk. I pull up a pattern that covers every other 16th note. That lays over my track like a cut-out panel so that whatever I do next only affects notes 2,4,6,8,10,12, 14 and 16. With pre-recorded tracks, it's like a filter. I click View to bring up the manipulation window.
The first line of controls is for velocity. I can use the wheel to change the velocity of all my pattern-selected notes. That's how you'd create a track from scratch - select a pattern that covers all 16 notes, hit your closed hat pad and raise the velocity to max - bam, hats on 16ths.
Anyway, I don't want to do that. I want to go down to the next line, which is Shift. Remember my pattern is only affecting alternate hats on the offbeat. The shift value is 0 for all hats in my track at the moment. I turn the wheel and the shift for my offbeat hats starts to rise. As you'd expect this causes them to trigger later in the track and the effect is swing, which I can control with the data wheel in real time.
Downside: you can't manipulate the shift values for an entire song as it plays, just one bar at a time. And as far as I can tell, you can't manipulate all the pads together - you can switch pads by hitting them, so it's fast, but it's still one pad at a time. I guess this is because Shift is just one of the functions, and editing the velocity for all pads together wouldn't make much sense (if you did it with a 16th note pattern you'd just end up triggering all the pads on every beat).
Hope that's of some use and reasonably accurate. It's great fun to play with and you can add some 'groove' (ugh) to a track very quickly - the View window has shortcut pattern buttons that are context-sensitive to the beat the cursor is on, so once you grok how it works you can make changes about as quickly as you can think of them. It reminds me of the groove function on my DR-202 but with a much more useful hands-on focus. I'll definitely be using it in future, so thanks for asking... If I'm missing something even better about it, let me know.
