bleepfreak wrote:The shift amount can be set to earlier and later and has an amount measured in ticks, the smallest grid in the MPC. You can also select a pad to move. The other notes will be left unaffected. You can also insert a time span to which the shift amount will be effective. Please note that the result can only be monitored after pressing DO IT.
In short this means you can push and pull your beats a little by applying this shift amount in a certain amount, during a cetain period of time to a certain note / pad. To find out how this works best for your music just experiment with the settings a lot. Then if you know how it works you can start applying it more conciously. You just have to spend time into timing...
Adding to this a sequencer is a timing grid stamping in notes and replaying the notes using a timing scale of 1/8, 1/16, and so on. We can edit when the notes timing on this scale by moving earlier or later to the core timing in ticks.
There are alot of shift ranges dependent on the timing 1/8, 1/16, also with triplets. Say 1/16 you can start to hear alot of different from the shift timing along the 15 to 40 range to start with. Shift timing is beat placement on the sequencer timing grid. You are like the poster above stated moving the pad or track even earlier or later on the timing grid to off beat for syncopation. One tip is to set the shift to the max and then bring it down tick by tick until your head is snapping to the groove you want. Like many other stated long before me you can add this to many different notes and add the swing to each too. It only works on quantized settings obviously but is a natural part of a sequencer so that a programmer can easily adjust the strict timing of a quantized pattern to a more offbeat human feel. We all have to learn our tools to get more usage out of them. The MPC`s major central control in within this part. And of course we can turn it off and go free hand too.
The same is use on DAW with the delay parameter in Logic along with the swing settings.